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OP ee Dkk — 


Poe ieAIND BIBLE 


THREE LECTURES ON THE 


SIGNIFICANCE OF ASSYRIOLOG- 
IGAL AE SEARCH FOR RELIGION 


EMBODYING THE MOST IMPORTANT CRITICISMS AND 
THE AUTHOR'S REPLIES 


BY 


DR FRIEDRICH DELITZSCH 


PROFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN 


TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN 


PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED 


CHICAGO 
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 
1906 





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be a r 
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“FIRST LECTURE COPYRIGHT 1902 
=, Tap es 
SECOND LECTURE COPYRIGHT 1903. THIRD LECTURE COPYRIGHT 1906 


BY oy 
Tur Oren Court Pusrisnine Co., 7 a 
CHICAGO, * “Te 
ie 
~» 


TABLE, OF CONTENTS. 


INTRODUCTION. (From Report of Smithsonian Institution.)...... 


Mounds in Mesopotamia, p. ix.—French Excavations, pp. x-xi.— 
English Excavations, pp. xi ff.— Library of Sardanapalus, pp. 
xiii f£—The Sun Temple of Sippar, pp. xiv-xvi—De Sarzec’s 
Discoveries of Diorite Sculptures and Other Works of Art, p. 
xvii—Ruins of the Temple of Bel at Nippur, p. xvill-xix.—Ger- 
many’s Part in the Excavations, p. xxii—Great Value in Inter- 
pretation of Old Testament, p. xxii—Origin of Modern Science 
in Chaldza, p. xxii. 


FIRST LECTURE. (Translated by Thomas J. McCormack)........ 


Excavations and the Bible, p. 1—A New Epoch, p. 2.—The Back- 
ground of the Old Testament, p. 3—The Home of Abraham, p. 4. 
—Cuneiform Literature, p. 5.—Illustrations of Bible Reports, p. 
6 ff.—Hezekiah and Sennacherib, pp. 6-8.—Seals, p. 9.—Sargon I, 
pp. 9-10.—Racial Types, pp. 10-11.—Assyrian Troops, pp. I1-13.— 
Assyrian Soldiers and Details of Armament, pp. 15-18.—The Royal 
Household, pp. 18-20.—Battling with the Lion, pp. 20-22—The 
Harem, pp. 23-24.—A Consort of Sardanapalus, pp. 23-25.—Tech- 
nical Knowledge and Art, pp.25-28.—Affinity Between Babylonian 
and Hebrew, p. 29—Aaron’s Blessing, pp. 29-30.—A_ Civilisation 
Comparable with Our Own, p. 30—Hammurabi’s Laws, pp. 30-31. 
—Commerce and Science, p. 33—The Splendors of Babylon, pp. 
33-34.—Clay Tablets, 35-37——Canaan a Babylonian Domain, p. 37. 
—The Sabbath Day, pp. 37-38.—A Tablet from El-Amarna, p. 38. 
—The Deluge, p. 38 ff.—Xisusthros, the Babylonian Noah, p. 39 
ff— The Gilgamesh Epic, p. 41 ff—Marduk and Yahveh, p. 43 ff. 
—Tiamat and Tehom, p. 45.—Stress Laid on Humane Conduct, p. 
47—The Serpent and the Fall of Man, pp. 47-48—The Under- 
world, pp. 49-50.—Job and the New Testament on Hell and Para- 
dise, p. 50—The Moslem Paradise, pp. 50-52.—Seraphim and 
Guardian Angels, pp. 53-55——Demons and Devils, pp. 55-58.— 
Monotheism, p. 59—Abraham’s Conversion, According to the 
Koran, p. 60.—The Word El, pp. 60-61.—The Name Yahveh, on a 
Clay Tablet of Hammurabi’s Time, pp. 61-62—The Sun-God of 


AS46820 


~ 


iv BABEL AND BIBLE. 
PAGE 
Sippar, pp. 62-63.—Ezekiel’s Vision Illustrated, pp. 64-65.—Baby- 
lonian Polytheism and Israelitic Particularism, pp. 65-66. 


SECOND LECTURE. (Translated by W. H. Carruth.).- 7-2 eee 67 


Isaiah’s Battle Song, p. 69.—Shrinking from Yahveh, p. 70.—Babel 
as Interpreter of the Bible, p. 71—Kutha and Chalach, the Home © 
of the Exiled Israelites, pp. 72-73—The Black Obelisk of Shal- 
maneser II, pp. 74-78.—The Re’em, or Wild Ox, pp. 79-83.—The 
Hill of Babil, pp. 81-83.—The Lion of Babylon, p. 84.—The Dragon 
of Babel, p. 85——Old Testament Scriptures Translated by Assyri- 
ology, p. 86—The Insanity of Nebuchadnezzar, p. 87—Book of 
Jonah, p. 88—Even the Modern Orient an Interpreter of the Bible, 
pp. 89-90.—The Magic Power of Spittle, p. 99 —Smoke and Fire, 
pp. 90-91.—Gula, the Awakener of the Dead, p. 91.—Revelation 
and the Old Testament, p. 92 ff—The Second Commandment ‘Sup- 
pressed, p. 93 ff. and also p. 102——-The Two Tablets Engraved 
by God’s Own Finger, p. 94.—Miracles of the Two Tablets in Pre- 
historic Reports, pp. 95-96.—The So-called Mosaic Law and the 
Code of Hammurabi, pp. 96-100.—The Covenant of Sinai, p. 100. 
—The Institution of Sabbath, p. to1.—The First Commandment 
and Monotheism, p. 102.—God in Names, p. 102 ff.—Babylonian 
Polytheism, Gross but Poetical, pp. 103-104—The Homeric Pan- 
theon, p. 104.—Anthropomorphism of Hebrew Prophets, p. 104.— 
Yahveh with Horns, p. 104—The Ancient of Days, p. 105—The 
Ethical Level of Israel and Babylon, p. 106.—The Position of 
Woman in Israel, p. 108.—The Goddess of Birth and Eve, p. 109 ff. 
—The Narrowness of Hebrew and Moslem Monotheism, pp. 110- 
112.—The Extermination of Gentiles, p. r11-112—God no Re- 
specter of Persons, pp. 112-113.—Ethical Monotheism, p. 113>— 
Outlook Upon the Future Development of Religion, p. 114. 


r 


fe STRUGGLE FOR BABEL AND BIBLE.....:..922.aeeee a TES 


fr 


IITERATURE ON “BABEL AND BIBLE.”’............ o> _qeteeeereeee 117 


OPINIONSHON “BABEL AND BIBUE.”......... gfe coco eee eee 120 
Emperor William on “Babel and Bible,” pp. 120-124.—Professor 
Harnack on the Emperor’s Attitude Toward “Babel and Bible,” 
pp. 125-130.—M. Halévy’s Opinion, pp. 130-131.—Cornill on “Ba- 
bel and Bible,” pp. 132-136—A Roman Catholic Verdict, pp. 136- 
137.—Alfred Jeremias on Delitzsch, pp. 137-139.—Higher Criticism 
and the Emperor, pp. 139-144. 


REPLY To CRITICS OF THE First LECTURE............ 2.003 145 


The Ethical Aspect, pp. 145-146.—The Primordial Chaos, p. 146. 
—Traces of Polytheism, p. 146.—Babylonian Monotheism, p. 146- 
147.—The Name “El,” pp. 148-150——The Name “Yahveh,” pp. 
150-151.—The Name “Yahum-ilu,” pp. 152-153——Processions of 
the Gods, p. 153—Aaron’s Blessing, pp. 153-155.—The Sabbath, 
pp. 155-156.—The Fall, pp. 157-158—Life After Death, pp. 158- 





BABEL AND BIBLE. V 


159. — Tiamat, pp. 159-161.— Angels, pp. 161-162. — Babylonian 
Superstitions in Sweden, p. 162.—Canaanites, pp. 162-163. 


REPLY TO CRIBICS’ OF THE SECOND LECTURE..... 2.5.26 .225. 265 60000 164 
Orthodoxy in Synagogue and Church, pp. 164-167.—Conclusion, 
p. 167. 
PaERD LECTURE. (Translated by Lydia G. Robinson.)...:....... 169 


The Limited Ethnology of Genesis X, pp. 171-173—The Sume- 
rians: Their Art and Character, pp. 173-175. — Nebuchadnezzar 
and Daniel, pp. 175-178.—Tiglath-pileser, pp. 178-180.—Character 
of Galileans, Babylonian, not Semitic, pp. 180 f£—‘“Son of Man,” 
pp. 181 f.—Musical Instruments, pp. 183-186.—Babylonian and 
Hebrew Psalms, pp. 186-191.— Psalm to Istar, pp. 191-195. — 
Ten Commandments in Code of Hammurabi, pp. 197-200.—Love 
of Neighbor, pp. 200-205.—Sin and Its Consequences, pp. 205-209. 
—Image Worship, pp. 209-210.—Polytheism, pp. 211-214.—Babylo- 
nian God-Conception, pp. 214-220——Semitic God-Conception, pp. 
221-224.—National Gods, pp. 224-232.—Prophecy in Babel and 
Bible, pp. 232-235.—Superiority of Christian Ideals, pp. 235-237 








INTRODUCTION 


INTRODUCTION 





\sf 
(AK 


INTRODUCTION.* 


HE traveler starting overland from the port of Alexandretta, 

in northern Syria, beholds beyond the high pass of Beilan the 
widely extended plain of Antioch, a view surprising in novelty and 
charm. As far as the eye can reach the plain is strewn with mounds 
of varying height, often grass-covered, their artificial origin easily 
discernible. These mysterious elevations, called by the Arabs Tell, 
by the Turks Tepe, accompany the traveler to Aleppo and even 
farther to the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris, and they constantly 
increase in height, extent, and number, from Mosul down the 
stream and through Babylonia, crossing into the Elamite plain and 
to Susa. They are the marks of the civilisation of pre-Christian 
millenniums. The large and small cities of the oldest empires of 
western Asia, of the Hittite states of northern Syria, of the Assy- 
rian, Babylonian, and Elamite empires, with their palaces and tem- 
ples, walls and gates, terraces and towers, lie buried beneath them. 

From these mounds of ruins of the Euphrates and Tigris region, 
weather beaten, grave, and silent, rising from the lonely and lifeless 
desert, French, English, and American explorers have plucked un- 
fading laurels. They have awakened to new life, after the sleep 
of thousands of years, the buried glory of millenniums gone, and 
from innumerable monuments of sculpture and writing living knowl- 
edge reaches us of Babylon, Nineveh, and of those earlier peoples 
whose civilisation continues, in no small measure, to be preserved 
in our own. The mounds of ruins in the fairyland of The Thousand 


* This article is a lecture which Professor Delitzsch delivered eight years 
ago and which was published by J. C. Hinrichs in 1808 under the title Ex 
Oriente Lux. The article was written for the special purpose of instigating 
interest in further excavations in the Orient, and has been translated into 
English by the Smithsonian Institution and published in their annual report 
for 1901. From the present essay which has been reproduced with the per- 
mission of the Smithsonian Institution those passages have been omitted which 
are of a merely temporary and local character, or practically duplicate por- 
tions of the text of Babel and Bible. 


x BABEL AND BIBLE. 


and One Nights have become for France, England, and America 
mounds of treasure-trove, from whose darkness they bring to light 
treasures of human art and science that are the greatest ornament 
and pride and the never-resting ambition of the great national 
museums. 

It was in the year 1820 that.Claudius James Rich, an officer 
of the English East India Company at Bagdad, undertook, for the 
recovery of his health, a trip into the Kurdish Mountains, and on 
his way back he spent a few days at Mosul, the well-known com- 
mercial town on the right bank of the Tigris. There the large 

»-nds on the other side of the river attracted his attention. They 
resemb'ed those which he had seen near Hilla on the Euphrates 
and which he correctly took for the remains of ancient Babylon. 
.s the so.thern of the two largest mounds still has the official name 
cf Nunia, and is crowned with a mosque dedicated to the prophet 
Jonah, the hypothesis suggested itself that there, opposite Mosul, 
lay the ruins of Nineveh, the ancient capital of Assyria. Rich ex- 
amined the mounds. He also heard of a large stone slab, engraved 
with representations of human figures and animals, which had been 
found some time before, but had been broken by the Turks because 
of religious prejudice. He was not, however, in a position to con- 
tinue his investigations. 

Now it happened that in 1842 Emile Botta, son of the well- 
known Italian historian, was appointed French consul at Mosul, 
and was encouraged by the famous Orientalist, Julius von Mohl— 
the second of the four brothers Mohl, who are a lasting honor to 
their native city Stuttgart—to follow up the path entered by Rich 
and to begin excavations in the mounds near Mosul. But neither 
on the southern mound, Nebi Yunus, nor on the northern, Kuyun- 
jik, were his endeavors rewarded with success. 

In March, 1843, a peasant of Khorsabad, a village situated 
four hours north of Mosul, told him that in the mound on which 
the village was built inscribed stones and similar objects had been 
found in great number. Botta thereupon began, on the 2oth of 
March, to dig at Khorsabad, and after but three days a room was 
opened, and a few days later another, the inner walls covered with 
alabaster slabs, on which were represented in bas-relief the cam- 
paigns and hunts, the gods and priests of a king. Full of joy, 
Botta, on the 2d of May, sent to Mohl a letter, with drawings of 
the inscriptions and sculptures. The drawings caused a lively sen- 
sation, and the French Government immediately made an appro- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. x1 


priation for further excavations. Botta had discovered, as we now 
know, the palace of Sargon, the conqueror of Samaria. 

In May, 1844, the inhabitants of the village were removed with 
the permission of the Sublime Porte, and thereupon the excavations 
continued on a larger scale. New rooms were continually freed 
from the débris, new sculptures, still exhibiting traces of color, to- 
gether with long-lined inscriptions, were continually brought to light, 
and the drawings of the French painter, Eugéne Flandin, which 
were later published at the cost of the State, served to raise still 
higher the general interest in Assyrian art and civilisation, which 
was believed irrevocably lost, and now, as if by magic, arose to 
new life. 

Botta’s successor, Victor Place, found, in 1852, the walls and 
gates of the city of Sargon, with gigantic winged bulls, and com- 
pleted the excavation of the palace, penetrating to the cellar, where 
the wine jars, with a reddish sediment in the bottom, were still stand- 
ing in long rows. An Assyrian king, concerning whom until then 
only a simple brief notice in the Old Testament (Isaiah xx. 1) gave 
information, suddenly rose before our eyes as a live, tangible per- 
sonage, and we now know as much about his wars and victories, 
his buildings and hunts, about the conditions of civilisation of the 
Assyrian empire and the contemporaneous history of the neighbor- 
ing states, as we know about any epoch of ancient Greece or Rome. 

It may be readily imagined that the glorious achievements ac- 
complished by French pluck, energy, and perseverance, which turned 
the eyes of the whole civilised world to the Assyrian collections in 
the Louvre, would not long leave the English idle spectators. Sir 
Austen Henry Layard, afterwards minister of Great Britain in 
Madrid and ambassador to Constantinople, had already visited those 
regions in 1840, and had shown the most lively interest in the work 
of Botta. It was not long before the English ambassador at Con- 
stantinople, Sir Stratford Cunning, succeeded in securing for Lay- 
ard the firman permitting excavations and the necessary funds. 
Layard immediately began excavations on a grand scale, receiving 
the cordial aid of the native population, for not only was Layard 
an adept in winning the love and gratitude of the natives every- 
where, but he had also in Hormuzd Rassam the most ideal com- 
panion, who, fully familiar with the Arabic character, could, as 
Layard acknowledged, secure the good will of the most savage 
with whom he came in contact. 

On November 28, 1845, Layard commenced his labors in Nim- 


X11 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


rud, situated a few kilometers south of Nineveh, and the first four 
months of 1846 brought to light the entire northwest palace of 
Shalmaneser I (1300 B. C.), the palace of Asurnazirpal, of the 
Biblical Tiglathpileser and Esarhaddon, and, especially with the 
palace of Asurnazirpal, a large number of sculptures and inscrip- 
tions of various kinds. 

Not less successful were the excavations at Nineveh, which 
Layard carried on after 1849 at the expense of the British Museum. 
Like the Babylonians, their masters, the Assyrian kings built their 
temples and palaces upon raised artificial terraces, from whose airy 
heights they not only enjoyed a purer and cooler atmosphere but 
escaped the fever, the inundations, and the mosquito swarms of 
the river flats. King Sennacherib erected such an elevated terrace 
of bricks, and his grandson, Asurbanipal, the Greek Sardanapalus, 
extended it. Both of these rulers built there magnificent palaces, 
surrounded by large parks, rivulets, and ponds, on whose isles 
water birds nested. And all this splendor and glory, covered by the 
mighty mound of ruins of Kuyunjik, were uncovered by the two 
English explorers. 

In the southwest corner of the mound Layard laid open the 
palace of Sennacherib, the largest Assyrian palace thus far known, 
with seventy-one rooms, galleries, and halls, the walls on every 
side covered with artistic bas-relief, depicting the edifices, the cam- 
paigns, and the domestic life of the king in a most vivid manner. 

Splendid and admirable as were the discoveries in the so-called 
southwest palace of Sennacherib, they were to be greatly surpassed 
by the treasures which were brought to light from the so-called 
north palace of Sardanapalus, discovered by Rassam in 1854. There, 
too, one state chamber after another was freed from débris; the 
long Babylonian gallery, the smaller Arabic room, so named because 
their wall reliefs represent the great deeds of the king and his 
armies in Babylonia, Arabia, etc. After two and a half thousands 
of years of darkness the light of the sun again burst in the 
halls decorated with sculptures and in the courts artistically paved 
with mosaics, exactly as when they were deserted in the year 607 
B. C., when the Median hordes, intoxicated with the blood of foes 
and the triumph of victory, raged there, burning and plundering. 
Light fell anew into the royal harem, conjuring up before our eyes 
most vividly scenes with which an artist of the seventh pre-Christian 
century decorated its walls with realistic truthfulness. On the floor 
of these and the adjoining rooms lay in thick layers fragments of the 


BABEL AND BIBLE. x111 


royal library, a collection of tablet books and documents once ar- 
ranged in the upper rooms, but which at the collapse fell through, 
crushed into thousands of large and small pieces. Baked clay 
tablets of all sizes, inscribed on both sides with fine Assyrian cunei- 
form characters, which, after being freed from dirt and dust can be 
as distinctly read as if they were but yesterday impressed into the 
soft clay, constituted this unique royal library. 

As if presaging the approaching collapse of the Assyrian em- 
pire, Sardanapalus ordered that the most important books and docu- 
ments from all the libraries in Babylonia should be collected, copied, 
some even in duplicate, and incorporated in his own library. Thus 
through the library of Sardanapalus there came to us a great part 
of the older, and indeed of the most ancient, works of Babylonian 
literature, and, as might be expected, only the most important 
works were considered worthy of admission into the royal library. 

The library contained historical works with information as to 
the relations, now peaceful, more often warlike, of Assyria with its 
mother country, Babylonia; chronological lists accurately fixing the 
reigns of all those ancient kings, Shalmaneser, Tiglathpileser, Sar- 
danapalus, and for a long period recording the most important event 
of each year; penitential psalms and hymns of praise, epics and 
myths that reveal the religious thought as well as the poetical en- 
dowment of the Babylonian people; large grammatico-lexicograph- 
ical works that for many decades to come will be an inexhaustible 
mine for Semitic philology ; astronomical, astrological, and magical 
tablets, the original works from which the wise men of the East— 
the Babylonian Magi—drew their learning which they afterwards 
spread over Greece and Rome; in addition a multitude of letters 
addressed to the great king of Assyria from the kings of Elam, 
from the generals abroad in hostile lands, from the court astron- 
omers who report to the king the happenings in the starry heavens, 
eclipses of the sun and moon, from the Magi, who, on the basis of 
the flight of birds, or the entrails of sacrificial animals, advise the 
royal majesty what to do and what to leave undone; letters from 
the royal physicians, petitions and entreaties from captives; besides 
copies of the letters and proclamations of the king himself. Four 
royal-octavo volumes, with 1,952 pages are required for the cata- 
logue of the thousands of clay tablets and prisms or fragments 
thus far transferred from Nineveh to the British Museum. 

What a mass of knowledge and multitude of new points of 
view for religious and profane history, for linguistics and geog- 


X1V BABEL AND BIBLE. 


raphy, for archeology in all its branches, has not the study of these 
ancient books revealed! Let us but recall that memorable autumn 
of 1872, when George Smith, one of the officers of the Egypto- 
Assyrian collection of the British Museum, while looking over the 
cuneiform fragments of the mythological series, found the original 
of the Babylonian-Biblical account of the deluge. He reported his 
find at the meeting of the London Society for Biblical Archeology 
on December 3, 1872. 

The discovery created the profoundest sensation in England, 
and far beyond her borders. In press and pulpit it was celebrated 
and commented upon. Babel, it was said, confirms the Bible. 
“Where men are silent the stones cry out.” The proprietors of the 
Daily Telegraph, almost immediately after that lecture, hastened to 
give George Smith a thousand guineas for further explorations in 
Nineveh. On January 20, 1873, George Smith set out on his jour- 
ney. In 1874 he was again sent—this time by the trustees of the 
British Museum—to Nineveh, constantly making discoveries, and in 
1876 undertook a third expedition to the East, which was to him 
“a way without return.” His last stay in Babylonia and Assyria— 
full of exertions and trials, where at the time, pest and cholera 
were raging—exhausted the strength of the indefatigable explorer. 
Accompanied by the English consul to Aleppo, he died there on 
August 19, 1876, covered with glory, fallen like a hero on the field 
of honor. , 

The traveler setting out from Bagdad in the direction of the 
little town of Hilla, traversing the plain which is spread out between 
the twin rivers Euphrates and Tigris where they are nearest one 
another, will, after passing many other mounds of ruins, arrive at 
a large one covering two English miles, named Abu Habba. Wall 
and castle are still clearly recognisable, but the highest point of 
this site of ruins is on the southwest side on the bank of a former 
arm of the Euphrates. When Rassam excavated here in 1881 he 
struck almost at once the walls of a building. The inclosure of a 
large quadrangular structure, 1,500 feet long on the southwest side, 
was laid bare, and further trenches and shafts showed that the 
edifices were grouped around a central court, and consisted of a 
line of long narrow rooms with exceptionally thick brick walls. 
In the interior of this structure a pair of interesting rooms was dis- 
covered and freed from the débris. At the excavating of a shaft 
that ran along a wall in the middle of the mound a doorway was 
reached which led to a large gallery 100 feet long and about 35 


BABEL AND BIBLE. XV 


feet wide. On it stood the remnants of a large sacrificial altar, 
made of bricks and measuring 30 feet square. Behind the altar, 
in the wall of this room, a door opened leading to a smaller room, 
and Rassam, as a result of experience gained in the Assyrian mound 
of Balawat, at once surmised that the temple archives had been 
here preserved. But though at Balawat the corner-stone documents 
of the builder of the temple were found in a stone chest, nothing sim- 
ilar was here discovered. On the other hand, the asphalt pavement 
attracted Rassam’s attention, and he therefore sunk a shaft in the 
floor, when, behold, scarcely had he broken through the cement 
layer when a clay chest appeared containing a beautiful artistically 
inscribed alabaster tablet, in six columns, decorated at the top with 
a carefully executed bas-relief. 

In this holy of holies a god with a long-flowing beard, in his 
hand a ring and short staff, was seated upon a throne decorated 
with cherubim (p. 63). A king followed by two priests approaches 
the god in adoration, while two other men are raising the sun disk 
with ropes upon the roof of the holy of holies. Certainly a valuable 
and admirable find in itself, but much more so because this document 
also revealed the name of the building, and of the city which was 
thus discovered : 


“IMAGE OF THE SUN GOD, THE GREAT LORD, WHO DWELLS IN THE 
TEMPLE EBABBARA IN THE CITY OF SIPPAR.” 


Thus reads the explanatory legend of the bas-relief. One of 
the oldest Babylonian cities has been found—Sippar, in which 
Noah-Xisusthros, by the command of the god Kronos, was ordered 
to bury the documents of antediluvian times; the sun temple, which 
since its foundation in the fourth millennium until long after the 
time of the last Chaldean king, Nabuna’id (538 B. C.), was the 
center of worship for Babylonia and the object of concern of all 
Babylonian kings, was rediscovered. This sun temple in the course 
of thousands of years, through revenues and donations, came in 
possession of untold riches in money and land. 

The forty to fifty thousand inscribed tablets that since 1881 
have been flowing from Abu Habba as from an inexhaustible source 
into the Occidental museums, above all into the British Museum, 
give an insight not only into the cult of the sun god and the deities 
worshipped beside him, into the division, obligations, and prerog- 
atives of the several priest classes, but also into the system of the 


Xvl BABEL AND BIBLE. 


temple revenues and their application. From the temple archives 
of the sun god is derived a great mass of tablets, which, after the 
fashion of commercial bookkeeping, record the temple revenues 
in money and other commodities, the expenses in salaries, wages, 
etc., and the investment and employment of the temple property 
in loans, real estate, rents, etc. If to these be added the numerous 
so-called contract tablets from Babylonia, Tell Sifr, and other places, 
with their varied contents, purchase and sale of slaves, marriage 
documents, acts of lawsuits, testaments, and the letters of the time 
of Hammurabi or Amraphel (Genesis, xiv) which were recently 
found, we derive a mass of the most important information on the 
commercial and judicial life as well as the economic conditions in 
the Babylonian state for a period of nearly two thousand years 
from the first Babylonian dynasty (2250 B. C.) until long after 
the time of the Achemenian kings. ~*~ 

The excavations at Sippar, Babylon, and elsewhere carried us 
back to the time of Hammurabi, that greatest king of the first Baby- 
lonian dynasty, who united the north and the south into one great 
Babylonian State, with Babylon as the capital. But the soil of Bab- 
ylonia, inexhaustible in surprises, was soon to afford us an outlook 
into a much higher antiquity of the Babylonian people and to carry 
us to still more remote ages in the history of humanity. 

From the same archives to which the above-mentioned votive 
tablet belonged, which was deposited by King Nebobaladan (882 


B. C.) in the sun temple at Sippar, came also, among other things, _ f 


a remarkable clay cylinder of the last Chaldean king, Nabuna’id. 
In it the king relates that he has decided to re-establish the sun 
temple upon its oldest foundation; for, in consequence of the re- 
peated rebuildings in the course of many centuries, the temple was 
obviously detached from its original foundation site, from its oldest 
“temen”; and that he has succeeded, after continuous and laborious. 
digging into the depths of the earth, in finding the “temen” of the 
first builder of the temple, Naram-Sin, Son of Sargon I, a “temen” 
which for forty-two hundred years had not been seen by the eye 
of man. This established the year 3750 before our era as the date 
of the reign of Naram-Sin and about 3800 as that of Sargon I, and 
opened a vista into the past of the human race on Babylonian soil 
which lies fifteen hundred years beyond the time of Hammurabi- 
Amraphel, or, to speak with the Old Testament, beyond the time 
of Abraham, a vista never anticipated and at first hardly credible. 
And still, little as was the inclination to accept so remote a date, 


BABEL AND BIBLE. XVi1 


there was as little reason to doubt it, and, in fact, the progress of 
the excavations was soon to prove it more and more indubitable. 

The French consul at Bassora, Ernest de Sarzec, who has been 
directing the French excavations on the south Babylonian site of 
the ruins of Tell Loh (Telloh) since 1875, had not long begun his 
work when he found those nine diorite statues, which represented 
partly in standing position, partly seated, the old priest-kings (pa- 
tesi) of the city of Lagash, named Ur-Bau and Gudea (p. 174). 
These statues, although the heads of all are missing, are valuable 
examples of the old Babylonian art of sculpture, and this value is 
considerably increased by the inscriptions which, on the breast, 
back, etc., are incised with the most consummate artistic skill and 
neatness, exciting the admiration of our modern stonecutters. While 
the archaism of the writing leads us back to a time long be- 
fore Hammurabi, the language in which they are composed shows 
that those ancient priest kings belonged neither to the Semitic nor 
to the Indo-Germanic stratum of the Babylonian population, but to 
the so-called Sumerian people, who spoke an agglutinative language, 
and who, though through the early centuries settled in Babylonia 
contemporaneously with the Semites, and in lively intercourse with 
them, must still be considered as the older native population from 
whom the Semites received the art of writing and other achieve- 
ments of civilisation. 

Since that first great discovery of De Sarzec, the finds of 
‘Telloh have steadily carried Babylonian history to earlier periods, 
as is evinced by indisputable art, historical and paleographical 
criteria. They carried it back to the time when the two Semitic 
kings of Agade, Shargani-shar-ali and Naram-Sin—and these, as is 
recognised with ever-increasing certainty, are Nabuna’id’s Sargon 
and Naram-Sin (3800 and 3750 B. C., respectively )—exercised 
sovereignty over Lagash, and the priest-king of this city, Lagal- 
Ushumgal, was their vassal. Nay even from an earlier time—the 
close of the fifth millennium—there rises before our eyes a whole 
line of hoary Sumerian patesis of Lagash—Ur-Nina, Eannadu, 
Enannatum, Entemena. And we know not only their names but 
most of their heroism against domestic and foreign foes, and of 
their efforts for the general welfare of their city and its inhabitants. 

As the origin of the cuneiform writing is more and more cleared 
up through the inscriptions of some of these most ancient rulers— 
above all, that of Eannadu—so one ray of light after another 
brightens the darkness spread over the earliest history of the great 


XVili BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Babylonian cities—Agade, Babel, Kish, and Lagash, Erech, and the 
“city of bows.” Nay, on some periods, especially the times of 
Sargon I and his son, Naram-Sin, a flood of light is shed. For 
much as it may be deplored that the archives, consisting of some 
30,000 tablets, cylinders, and large inscribed pebbles, found in 1894 
in a cellar-shaped room at Telloh, were scattered everywhere by the 
thievish Arabs, the documents themselves are not lost to science, 
whether they came to the museums of Constantinople, Paris, Ber- 
lin, Philadelphia, or elsewhere ; and they reveal to us in a surprising 
and at the same time in detailed manner the commercial, agricultural, 
and economic conditions, as well as the civic and religious life of 
the times of Sargon I and Naram-Sin. Even pierced lumps of clay 
were found with the names of Sargon or Naram-Sin stamped upon 
them, inscribed with the names of the addressee, the place of desti- 
nation, and evidently attached to bales of merchandise, to be for- 
warded from Agade to Lagash. 

One of the oldest sanctuaries upon earth is the temple of the 
lord of the universe, Bel, in the middle Babylonian city of Nippur. 
The ruins of this city, now called Nuffar, and especially the gigantic 
remains of this temple, were the goal of the three expeditions from 
Philadelphia, which, from 1886 up to the present time, under the 
direction of John P. Peters, Hermann V. Hilprecht, and J. H. 
Haynes, have excavated and constantly made discoveries of the 
greatest import to science on that vast site of ruins. Two temple 
archives rewarded the labors of the American explorers within a 
few years. True, those of Sargon I lay in ruins; enemies, probably 
the Elamites, plundered and destroyed them. But if only the vases 
of the pre-Sargonic king of Erech, Lugal Zaggisi, son of a patesi 
of the “city of bows,” which were pieced together from thousands 
of fragments, had been found they would be an ample reward on 
account of the historical and paleographical information that they 
furnish. The records of the Kossean kings were intact. They con- 
tained all the votive gifts that the kings of the so-called third 
Babylonian dynasty had presented to the god Bel. 

Down to 1896 there were cleared from the ruins of Nuffar, 
successively, 2,000, 8,000, and 21,000 clay tablets and fragments, 
inscribed and stamped bricks, stone and clay vases. They were of 
the pre-Sargonic period, as well as of all the later periods of Baby- 
lonian history, from Sargon I and Naram-Sin, and even from Ur- 
Gur and Dungi, the two ancient kings of the city of Ur, down to 
Darius II and Artaxerxes Mnemon. They embraced syllabaries, 


BABEL AND BIBLE. x1x 


chronological lists, letters, astronomical and religious texts, tax lists, 
plans of real estate, contracts, besides images of divinities and toys 
of terra cotta, weapons and implements of stone and metal, orna- 
ments of gold, silver, copper, and bronze, carved precious stones 
and weights. It was estimated that the inscribed monuments found 
up to 1896 would fill 12 volumes of two to three parts each if pub- 
lished. What specially distinguishes the excavations of the Amer- 
icans is the systematic clearing up of the single layers of the mighty 
temple edifice and of its superstructure. 

The colossal ruins of the tower of the temple of Bel, now 
called Bint-el-Amir, rises 29 meters above the plain and 15 meters 
above the mass of debris which surrounds it. The immense plat- 
form, about 2.40 meters thick, constructed of sun-dried bricks, to- 
gether with the three-story temple tower erected upon it, probably 
a work of King Ur-Gur, was laid bare and the ascent to the single 
stages in the southeast of the ruin was found. Close under this 
platform another pavement was discovered, consisting of two layers 
of baked bricks of about 50 centimeters square and 8 centimeters 
thick. Most of them were stamped, some with the name of Shar- 
gani-shar-ali, the others with that of Naram-Sin. Both kinds were 
intermingled in both brick layers, so that the identity of Shargani- 
shar-ali with the Sargon of Nabuna’id (3800 B.C.) was made sure. 
Ur-Gur had, it appears, razed the buildings of his predecessors and 
elevated the platform of his temple tower over the pavement of 
_Naram-Sin. 
~~ J. H. Haynes who since 1894 has been alone at the ruins of the 
temple of Bel, superintending the excavations, was not content with 
these chronologically important revelations, but sunk shafts in sev- 
eral places under Naram-Sin’s platform and searched the entire 
earth stratum, which was about 9.25 meters deep, down to the 
underground water, for remains of human civilisation. This great 
sacrifice of time, labor, and perseverance was to be rewarded in a 
way that could not have been anticipated. For, in one place, not 
far below Naram-Sin’s platform, was found an altar of sun-dried 
bricks, the top of which was surrounded by a rim of asphalt and 
covered with a layer of white ashes, 6.5 centimeters thick and the 
remains of burnt sacrificial animals; still farther below there was 
unearthed a large, beautifully decorated terra-cotta vase in perfect 
condition, an excellent example of old Babylonian ceramic art. And 
in another part of these underground excavations the oldest archi- 
tectural arch of a drainage canal, and still farther down, in the 


XX BABEL AND BIBLE. 


deepest layers, or, what amounts to the same, back in many centuries 
beyond the fifth millennium, everywhere interesting and valuable 
remains of human civilisation came to light, fragments of vessels 
of copper, bronze, and clay, a mass of earthenware, so beautifully 
lacquered in red and black that one might consider them of Greek 
origin, or at least influenced by Greek art, had they not been found 
8 meters deep under Naram-Sin’s pavement. 

We could go on a long time in this way were we to enumerate 
all the achievements which various explorers, supported by the 
energetic interest of their governments and aided by the liberality 
of their countrymen, have accomplished and are still accomplishing 
on the ruined sites of Assyria, Babylonia, and Elam. We could 
speak of Hormuzd Rassam’s finding of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace 
in the middle mound of Babylon, called Kasr ; of two beautiful wells 
which reached down to the water level of the Euphrates, and of 
other traces of water balances in the extreme northern mound Babil, 
probably the site of the hanging gardens of Semiramis. We could 
describe the successful expeditions of Jules Oppert, William Ben- 
nett Loftus, Sir Henry Rawlinson, and, above all, tell of the great 
work of the Dieulafoys on the ruins of Susa. But we must forego 
this here, and will mention in passing that only recently the French 
Government succeeded in acquiring for 5,000 francs the right from 
the Shah of Persia to excavate for all time in Susa and the surround- 
ing province and to transfer half of the finds to France, while for 
the other half it secured the first option. The French have been~ 
active in Susa since November, 1897, under the direction-of De 
Morgan, while De Sarzec and Haynes continued their labors with 
undiminished and untiring zeal. 

Germany may justly be proud that one of her sons, the Han- 
noverian Georg Friedrich Grotefeld (born in 1775 at Munden), 
as a young teacher at the gymnasium of Gottingen in 1802, had the 
genius to decipher the cuneiform writing, and thus placed the key 
in the hand of science which was to unlock not only the old Persian 
monuments, but also the great Babylonian-Assyrian cuneiform lit- 
erature, and in addition to that make possible the reading of the 
Armenian and Elamite cuneiform script. Germany may also glory 
in the fact that a scholar of German blood, Julius von Mohl, gave 
the first impulse to the excavations in Nineveh; she can also note 
with satisfaction that the enthusiastic interest which is being brought 
to the Assyriological studies, especially in America, and from which 


BABEL AND BIBLE. Xx1 


grew the Philadelphia expeditions, was awakened in the German 
universities. 

No one can deny that the excavations in the mounds of Meso- 
potamia have opened and are continually opening new and _ rich 
sources of highest importance for an entire series of sciences—Old 
Testament research, ancient history and geography, the history of 
art and archeology, the history of religion and comparative mythol- 
ogy, Semitic and general philology, comparative history of juris- 
prudence, the history of astronomy and mathematics, and many 
other sciences. We must refrain from entering into details and can 
only briefly refer to a few facts. 

For the history of art, particularly the history of sculpture and 
architecture, and in a measure also of painting and some of the 
industries, such as stonecutting and pottery, a peculiar and highly 
important link was recovered through the resurrection of Assyrio- 
Babylonian antiquity, the more important as the history of the 
development of the Babylonian art can be followed up to the fifth 
pre-Christian millennium. The image of Naram-Sin found at Diar- 
bekr, the famous vulture stele of Eannadu, the sculpture with the 
representation of Ur-Nina and his sons, will forever remain mile- 
stones in the history of the art of western Asia, and of human 
artistic skill in general. And as it is an established fact that “the 
_forms of the column, and some other ornaments of Greek art which 
are much in use, are first met in Assyrian sculptures,” light from the 
East may also be hoped for to illuminate the darkness in which 
the origin of the oldest Greek art is in many respects still enveloped. 

The light which sprang from Oriental ruined mounds has with 
one stroke illuminated the sphere of the ancient peoples and states 
of Western Asia, so distant in time and space, and restored it to 
ancient history. The nebulous forms of Ninus, Semiramis, and the 
effeminate Sardanapalus have been replaced by clear-cut individ- 
ualities. The old great culture states—the old Babylonian, Assyr- 
ian, and Chaldean empires, their external political history and in- 
ternal development in commerce and industry, law and religion, 
manners and customs—enter into our horizon with steadily increas- 
ing completeness and vividness. At the same time they furnish us 
the most valuable information on the history of the neighboring 
‘kingdoms, from Elam to Canaan, on the ethnic movements which 

during four millenniums took place in the large quadrangle of lands 
between the Black and Caspian seas and the borders of Egypt- 


XX11 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Arabia. And how many chronological and geographical riddles 
have not been solved or at least brought nearer to solution! 
Assyriological research which sprang from the ruins of Baby- 
lon and Nineveh has above all shown itself fruitful for the science 
of the Old Testament, and for it promises to bear still more fruit. 
For not only is the Assyrian language most akin to Hebrew, afford- 
ing new information on questions of grammar, lexicography, and 
phraseology, but there is scarcely a book of the Old Testament the 
interpretation of whose subject-matter has not been aided to some 
extent by the cuneiform monuments. The narratives and concep- 
tions of the Book of Genesis of the creation of the world—the ser- 
pent as the arch-enemy of the Deity and embodiment of all sin and 
malice, the ten patriarchs, and the catastrophe of the Deluge which 
destroyed primitive humanity, so well known and familiar to us 
from childhood—appear in a new light through the surprising par- 
allels which the Babylonian-Assyrian clay books furnish. The Old 
Testament history, especially that of Israel from Chedorlaomer to 
Belshazzar and the Achemenian kings, interlinked with the history 
of Babel and Ashur, continually receives new light from the latter. 
The chronology of the kings of Judah and Israel is, through the 
chronology of the Assyrian empire, placed on a more secure basis 
than was possible before; and since in the annals of the Assyrian 
kings mention is made of the kings Ahab and Jehu, Pekah and 
Hosea, Ahaz and Hezekiah, the possibility is afforded of comparing 
more than one narrative of the historical and prophetical books, as 
for instance, that of Sennacherib’s campaign against Jerusalem, 
with the records of the opposing side. Hebrew antiquity is con- 
nected by hundreds of threads with that of western Asia, particu- 
larly of Babylonia and Assyria. The deeper insight which we 
now have into the belief and cult of the gods, especially into the 
nature of the sacrifices of the Babylonians, their conception of the 
winged angelic beings after the manner of the cherubim and sera- 
phim, their views of life after death, their bestowing of names, the 
peculiarities of their psalm poetry in form and matter, their manners 
and customs, their systems of measures and weights, etc., directly 
serve the advancement of Old Testament theology and archeology. 
The resplendence of the starry sky over the endless expanse 
of the Euphrates’s land is something wonderful; the stars sparkle 
with the greatest brilliancy, and the movements of the planets, the 
changes of the moon, the various meteors, enchant the attention 
at night. The Babylonians learned to calculate the course of the 


BABEL AND BIBLE. XX111 


stars, their observations constituted the foundations of the astro- 
nomical studies of the learned Alexandrians. And when we even 
to-day divide the circle into 360 degrees, the day into twelve hours 
of sixty minutes; when we count seven days of the week and name 
them after the planets ; when we divide the apparent path of the sun 
according to the signs of the zodiac, we therein directly follow 
those old Chaldzans, whose great scientific accuracy, while it has 
left traces in some other things, has borne imperishable fruit in the 
science of astronomy, which originated with them. And just as 
the first chapters of the history of astronomy can only be written 
with the aid of cuneiform works or notices, we must see in the same 
sources the history of mathematics, geometry, metrology. Nay, 
in many respects our present civilisation is still under the influence 
of the hoary Babylonian; the week and its seven days and the names 
of so many constellations, «as well as our old square measure, the 
cubit, and our old weight, the pound, have their homes in Babylonia. 
Jurisprudence has good reason for the assumption that the often 
striking agreements between Roman and Babylonian law will clear 
up the origins of Roman law, which, at least partly, are still obscure. 
In the exceedingly rich Babylonian-Assyrian “contract literature” 
an abundant as well as valuable source was disclosed for the compar- 
ative history of jurisprudence; many other functions of state insti- 
tutions receive new and instructive data of a comparative and his- 
torical nature from the results of the excavations. We have in 
mind, for instance, the economic development of those ancient cul- 
ture states, or of the history of war in its manifold branches. Do 
not the bas-reliefs on the alabaster slabs and bronzes of the Assyrian 
palaces furnish instructive information as to the progress in cloth- 
ing and arming of the Assyrian army, the developing of the cavalry, 
the technique of fortification, the defense and attack by means of 
machines of assault and mines, on scouting and pontoon building? 
Truly, a new world is opened to human knowledge and inquiry 
through the Babylonian-Assyrian excavations. 


A 
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ERRATA 


For moisted read moistened. 


Page go, line 9 
us or, *" 1. ‘ Assoria ‘“* Assyria. 
i ono o.° “* Sask ‘* seek. 
USES i) Ge “conform ‘'‘ confirm. 
He eera2,, ft ors: ‘* victions ‘‘ dictions. 
Sascg, “* 1,“ up.God*’ ‘up to God. 
‘* 162, ‘© 7 from bottom. For than these read that these. 
SeemelOS se 8 IQ) ut ‘* Holly ‘Holy. 
EOS, nes os sieT. ic ue ‘' onthe other ‘' ontheother hand 
Seroo. 8! ar ts tye ** 4993, “| 1903. 


** 167, ‘* 3. For the least read in the least. 





bis fh LECTURE 





FIRST LECTURE. 


O what end this toil and trouble in distant, inhospit- 
able, and danger-ridden lands? Why all this ex- 

pense in ransacking to their utmost depths the rubbish 
heaps of forgotten centuries, where we know neither 
treasures of gold nor of silver exist? Why this zealous 
emulation on the part of the nations to secure the great- 
est possible number of mounds for excavation? And 
whence, too, that constantly increasing interest, that 
burning enthusiasm, born of generous sacrifice, now be- 
ing bestowed on both sides of the Atlantic on the excava- 
tions of Babylonia and Assyria? 

One answer echoes to all these questions,—one an- 
swer, which, if not absolutely adequate, is yet largely the 
reason and consummation of it all: the Bible. A magic 
halo, woven in earliest youth, encircles the names of 
Nineveh and Babylon, an irresistible fascination abides 
for us all in the stories of Belshazzar and the Wise Men 
of the East. The long-lasting dynasties here awakened 
to new life, however potent for history and civilisation 
they may have been, would not have aroused a tithe of 
their present interest, did they not number among them 
the names of Amraphel, Sennacherib, and Nebuchadnez- 


zar, with whom we have been familiar from childhood. 


2 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


And with the graven memories of youth is associated 
the deeper longing of maturity,—the longing, so charac- 
teristic of our age,—to possess a philosophy of the world 
and of life that will satisfy both the heart and the head. 
And this again leads us directly to the Bible, and notably 
to the Old Testament, with which historically our mod- 
ern views are indissolubly connected. 

The minute, exhaustive scrutiny to which untold 
numbers of Christian scholars in Germany, England, and 
America—the three Bible-lands, as we may justly call 
them—are submitting the Old Testament, that little 
library of books of most varied hue, is nothing less than 
astounding. 

Of these silent intellectual labors the world has as 
yet taken but little notice. Yet this much is certain, 
that when the sum-total and ultimate upshot of the new 
knowledge shall have burst the barriers of the scholar’s 
study and entered the broad path of life,—shall have 
entered our churches, schools, and homes,—the life of 
humanity will be more profoundly stirred and be made 
the recipient of more significant and enduring progress 
than it has by all the discoveries of modern physical and 
natural science put together. So far, at any rate, the 
conviction has steadily and universally established itself 
that the results of the Babylonian and Assyrian excava- 
tions are destined to inaugurate a new epoch, not only in 
our intellectual life, but especially in the criticism and 
comprehension of the Old Testament, and that from now 
till all futurity the names of Babel and Arb/e will remain 
inseparably linked together. 

How times have changed! ‘There was David and 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 3 


there was Solomon, 1000 years before Christ ; and Moses, 
1400 years; and Abraham eight centuries prior. And of 
all these men we had the minutest information! It was 
so unique, so supernatural, that one credulously accepted 
along with it stories concerning the origin of the world 
and mankind. ‘The very greatest minds stood, and some 
of them still stand to-day, under the puissant thrall of 
the mystery encompassing the First Book of Moses. But 
now that the pyramids have opened their depths and the 
Assyrian palaces their portals, the people of Israel, with 
its literature, appears as the youngest member only of a 
venerable and hoary group of nations.. 

The Old Testament formed a world by itself till far 
into the last century. It spoke of times to whose latest 
limits the age of classical antiquity barely reached, and 
of nations that have met cither with none or with the 
most cursory allusion from the Greeks and the Romans. 
The Bible was the sole source of our knowledge of the 
fstom,o1 Hither Asia prior to 550 B. C., and since its 
vision extended over all that immense quadrangle lying 
between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf and 
stretching from Mount Ararat to Ethiopia, it naturally 
teemed with enigmas that might otherwise have tarried 
till eternity for their solution. But now the walls that 
formed the impenetrable background to the scenes of the 
Old Testament have suddenly fallen, and a keen invigo- 
rating air and a flood of light from the Orient pervades 
and irradiates the hoary book,—animating and illuminat- 
ing it the more as Hebrew antiquity is linked together 
from beginning to end with Babylonia and Assyria. 


The American excavations at Nippur brought to 


4 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


light the business records of a great wholesale house, 
Murashti & Sons, operating in that city in the reign of 
Artaxerxes (450 B. C.). We read in these records the 
names of many Jewish exiles that had remained in Babel, 
as Nathaniel, Haggai, and Benjamin, and we read also 
of a canal Aabar in connection with the city of Nippur, 
which is the original of the canal of Adar rendered fa- 
mous by HEzekiel’s vision and situated ‘‘in the land of 
the Chaldzeans’’ (Ezekiel 1.3). ‘This ‘‘ grand canal,” 
for such the name means, may possibly exist to this very 


day. 


















































Fig. 1. UR OF THE CHALDEES, THE HOME OF ABRAHAM AND THE 
FOREFATHERS OF ISRAEL. 


(Ruins of el-Muqayyer, pronounced Mukayyer, English Mugheir.) 

Since the Babylonian bricks usually bear a stamp 
containing along with other marks the name of the city 
in which the building of which it formed a part was 
erected, it was made possible for Sir Henry Rawlinson as 


early as the year 1849 to rediscover the much-sought-for 
city of Ur of the Chaldees, the home of Abraham and the 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 3 


ancestors of the tribes of Israel (Genesis xi. 31 and xv. 7). 
The discovery was made in the gigantic mound of ruins 
of Mugheir on the right bank of the lower Euphrates 
(see Fig. 1), which is now the storm-center of warring 
Arab tribes. The certainty of the discovery has been 
more and more established. 

The data of the cuneiform literature shed light also 
on geographical matters: formerly the site of the city of 





Biige2: Hittite IDEOGRAPHIC Fig. 3. Ktinc HAMMURABI. THE KING 
WRITING FROM CARCHEMISH.! AMRAPHEL OF THE BIBLE. 


Carchemish, where Nebuchadnezzar in 605 B.C. won his 
‘great battle from Pharaoh-necho (Jeremiah xlvi. 2) was 
sought for at random on the banks of the Euphrates, but 
in March, 1876, the English Assyriologist George Smith, 
starting from Aleppo and following the river downward 
from Biredjik, rode directly to the spot where from the 


1Confirming the discovery of the site of Carchemish, where Nebuchednezzar 
‘defeated Necho in 605 B.C. 


6 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


tenor of the cuneiform inscriptions the city of the Hittite 
kings must have lain, and at once and unhesitatingly 
identified the vast ruins of Dsherabis there situate, with 
their walls and palace-mounds, more extensive than Nin- 
eveh itself, with the ancient city of Carchemish,—a con- 
clusion that was immediately afterward confirmed by the 
inscriptions in the unique ideographic Hittite script that 
were strewn over the entire site of the ruins (Fig. 2). 

And like many names of places, so also many of the 
personalities named in the Bible, have received new light 
and life. The book of the prophet Isaiah (xx. 1) men- 
tions an Assyrian king by the name of Sargon, who 
sent his marshal against Ashdod; and when in 1843 the 
French consul Emile Botta began his excavations on the 
mound of ruins situated not far from Mosul, and thus in- 
augurated archeological research on Mesopotamian soil, 
the first Assyrian palace unearthed was the palace of this 
same Sargon, the conqueror of Samaria. Nay, on one of 
the superb alabaster reliefs with which the walls of the 
palace chambers were adorned, the very person of this 
mighty warrior conversing with his marshal appears be- 
fore our eyes (Fig. 4). 

The Book of Kings (2 Kings xviii. 14) narrates that 
King Sennacherib received tribute from King Hezekiah 
in the city of Lachish in southern Palestine. Now, a re- 
lief from Sargon’s palace in Nineveh shows the great As- 
syrian king enthroned before his tent in sight of a con- 
quered city, and the accompanying inscription reads: 
‘‘Sennacherib, the king of the universe, king of Ashur, 
seated himself upon his throne and inspected the booty of 


Lachish.”’ 


BABEL:AND BIBLE. 


a | 


And again, Sennacherib’s Babylonian rival Mero- 
dach-Baladan, who according to the Bible (2 Kings xx. 
12) sent letters and a present to King Hezekiah, is shown 


us in his own likeness by a magnificent diorite relief now 


yi 
SSNAAA 
<— Y uN 


Sy 


YY 















a f PURGE Tk aT ] TATA AT (a Mh WN este wy 
ent ee TAM | | i MG tals Hy il 
ne ee a i a i | NY mi 





Fig. 4. Kina Sarcon II. anp His Marsuat. 


in Berlin, where before the king is the lord-mayor of the 
city of Babylon, to whom the sovereign in his gracious- 


ness has seen fit to grant large tracts of land. Even the 


in 


In 


mi bee ist ear 
5 Nat a taw 





Fig. 5. ASSYRIAN KING IN STATE COSTUME. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 9 


contemporary of Abraham, Amraphel, the great king 
Hammurabi, is now represented by a likeness (Fig. 3). 
Thus, all the men that made the history of the world for 


3000 long years, rise to life again, and the most costly 





Fig. 6. SEAL oF Kina Darius. 


relics have been bequeathed to us by them. Here is the 
seal of King Darius, the son of Hystaspes (Fig. 6), where 
the king is represented as hunting the lion under the 
sublime protection of Ahura Mazda, and at the side 1s the 


trilingual inscription: ‘‘I am Darius, the great king,’’— 














AN gues } 


enaue 





Fig. 7. Seat or Sargon I. (Third or fourth millennium B. C.) 


a genuine treasure of the British Museum. Here is the 
state seal of one of the oldest known Babylonian rulers, 
Shargani-shar-ali, or Sargon I., who flourished in the 
third, or possibly the fourth, millennium before Christ 


10 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


(Fig. 7). This king, as the legend runs, knew not his 
own father, the latter having met his death prior to the 
birth of his son; and since the father’s brother cared not 





. 


Elamite Jew of Lachish Israelite 


Babylonian merchant Arab horseman 


Fig. 8. RactaL TyPEs. 


for the widowed mother, great affliction attended the son’s 


entrance into this world; we read: ‘‘In Azupiran, on 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 11 


the banks of the Euphrates, she bore me in concealment ; 
she placed me in a box of reeds, sealed my door with 
pitch, and cast me upon the river, which conveyed me on 
its waves to Akki, the water-carrier. He took me up in 
the kindness of his heart, reared me as his own child, 
made me his gardener. Then Ishtar, the daughter of the 
King of Heaven, showed fondness for me and made me 
king over men.’’ 

And not only kings and generals, but also extzre na- 
tzons, have been brought to life again by these discov- 
eries. If we compare the various types of nationality 
engraved on the monuments of Assyrian art, and, taking 
for example two types that we know, here scrutinise the 
picture of a Jew of Lachish (Fig. &), and here the repre- 
sentation of an Israelite of the time of Jehu, we are not 
likely to be wrong in our conclusion that also the other 
national types, for example the Elamite chieftain, the 
Arab horseman, and the Babylonian merchant, have been 
depicted and reproduced with the same fidelity and exact- 
“ness. Particularly the Assyrians, who sixty years ago 
were supposed to have perished with all their history and 
civilisation in the great river of time, have been made 
known to us in the minutest details by excavations in 
Nineveh, and many passages in the prophetic books re- 
ceive gorgeous illustration from our discoveries. Thus, 
Isaiah describes in the following eloquent language the 


Assyrian troops: 


‘¢Behold, they shall come with speed swiftly: None shall be 
weary nor stumble among them; none shall slumber nor sleep; 
neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor the latchet of 


their shoes be broken :. Whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows 


eZ BABEL AND BIBLE. 









Ssssseses 
ae AN UN Posh ACS 
SO UNG Zest 
ae 


Tate oak weerh 
al \I v4 uy pis fae Bee 
Gh Ae 





oe ow we 





1 il fi 




















f 7 My 78 
I ft / : 
) It iy rie 
) i j ue i ‘ NS: 



























Qe der OTe C10) Olu e Lele 766 mame 





(SOL eee CRE Ee RIES RLER 
PC ht este CH AT oe 


EPL RNA aac Ml 
Gal ie Ay Ny A i aii 
ieee ida if |, Wie 
eo LEON Bie 

| UR PR CC 


AUSMIR 4 io be Cay mee nt a 
TR URe Zao. Dies P<) 14 OR I * 


a (or | Aare Lee a Dee 

ve neal {4 yo fl mele y 

= Ty i! b, ; ,( } \"] | in {UR 
= i] \ ‘ en {lar 

=e eee 1 il ok. ls ie 


















Se 
FEES 


a 


oS 
Tae 


2 







a 







- 
= 2 sae 


oe, 8 © mw ee eee 









































" % 


Fig. 9. Bronze GATES OF THE PALACE OF SHALMANESER II. (At Balawat.) 


a. BABEL AND BIBLE. 1 


o>) 


ent, their horses’ hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels 


like a whirlwind: Their roaring shall be like a lion, yea, they shall 
























































Fig. ro, ASSYRIANS BATTERING A FORTRESS. 








Fig. 11. DeErarL-Group ON BRONZE GaTE. 


Above war-chariots and below captives led before the king. 


roar, and lay hold of the prey, and shall carry it away safe, and 


none shall deliver it.”—(lsatah, v. 27—29. ) 


14 BABEL AND BIBLE. 






































Fig. 12. PRocESSION OF FEMALE Captives. (Detail-group on bronze gate.) 





Fig. 13. ASSYRIAN BOWMEN AND SPEARMEN ATTACKING A HOSTILE ForTRESS. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 15 


We can now see these same Assyrian soldiers arising 
from their camp in the early morn and dashing their bat- 


tering-rams against the enemy’s fortress (Fig. 10); and 





Fig. 13a. GRAZING ANTELOPES. 
(Idyllic scene picturing the intense realism of Assyrian art.) 


REGS 


\ 
NAG Cm x 
| 


ty 3 i) { =n e, . 9 
{ DES 9. SRK Moos RERZUOCS ‘< 
0% 4" ( & (RAR KAALAA 


I 





Fig. 14. ASSYRIAN SLINGERS. 


on other representations (Figs. 11 and 12) may be seen 


the unfortunate prisoners conducted the way from which 


16 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


there is no home-coming. We see also (Fig. 13) the 
Assyrian bowmen and spearmen casting their weapons 
toward the hostile fortress, and in another case Assyrian 
warriors storming an elevation defended by hostile arch- 
ers. "They pull themselves upward by the branches of 





Fig. 15. Heap oF WINGED BULL. 


Showing details of Assyrian mode of dressing the beard, as worn 
by the king and the officers of the army. 


the trees, or clamber to the summit with the help of 
staffs; whilst others drag in triumph the severed heads 
of their enemies into the valley. 

The military system of this first great warrior-state 
of the world is shown forth to us in a vast number of sim- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. i ies 






\W) 


GR ROU ae) Ny PR Ie 
BEEN ASRS BS ty 
AIRES Fy. gE a 


Fig 16. THe KinG’s CHARIOT IN A PaRADE. 


NON NN NR NON WW 
POPOL ord 


TT AO A 
z Se 


ae: 


tui 





Fig. 17. OFFICERS OF ASHURBANIPAL (SARDANAPALUS) ENTERING Court. 


18 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


ilar representations on the bronze doors of Shalmaneser 
II. (Fig. 9) and on the alabaster reliefs of the palaces of 
Sargon and Sennacherib, with all details of armament 
and equipment and in all phases of development. (See, 
for example, Fig. 14.) 








nee Ry Mi 


PYG: 


es HAS ya 
Ye 7 ive y) te Wh 





Tagg 


on eae 


AN 


ai 


« 
1 a v/ mill i LIK si 





‘i viele ask LN \; 
wat aN live A avi 





Fig. 18. PaGes CARRYING THE Roya CHARIOT. 


Again we have the portrait of an Assyrian officer of 
Sargon’s general staff, the style of whose beard surpasses 
in artistic cut anything that has been attempted by mod- 
ern officers. (See, for example, Fig. 15.) Here we see 
the officers of the royal household making their cere- 
monial entry (Fig. 17), or pages carrying the royal char- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 19 


iot (Fig. 18), or the royal throne (Fig. 19). Many beau- 
tiful reliefs show us King Sardanapalus following the 
chase, especially in his favorite sport of hunting lions, of 
which a goodly number of magnificent specimens were 


= 


cS = 
5 @ 
~ 4 } 
‘ . 
We i aeons 
+1 L 
pS SEE at oes a5 2 


AE 


Acs t 3 
iis — 
‘ay = 
| : 
Pr Lagi 
site : 
Lie) 4 
e) \@ 
vai f 
ate A 4 
d i ’ 
id cts Gers 
{ 2 
hal | 
72h t Pepe 
Dae. 
® te 
i} ea, pate 
Wb) f 
PG eA ¢ 24 
; y Ar tt 
it fy Eres 
f tt <9) 
A44e 
APES Prema 
; 





—- 
nS 


aie a ae Pie bi 1 





Fig. 19. PaGEs CARRYING THE Royal THRONE. 


constantly kept at hand in parks specially reserved for 
this purpose. (Figs. 20-25.) 

When King Saul refused to suffer young David to 
go forth to do battle with the giant Goliath, David re- 


20 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


minded him that he had been the shepherd of his father’s 
flocks and that when a lion or a bear had come and taken 
a lamb from his flock, he had gone out after the beast and 





Fig. 20, KING SARDANAPALUS ON HORSEBACK. 


had smitten it and wrested from it its prey, and that if 
after that it had risen against him he had caught the lion 





Fig. 2t. SARDANAPALUS HUNTING THE LION ON HORSEBACK. 


by its beard and slain it. Precisely the same custom pre- 
vailed in Assyria; and the reliefs show King Sardana- 
palus doing battle with the lion, not only on horseback 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 21 











Fig. 22. HuNTING THE LION FROM A CHARIOT. 





Fig. 23. SARDANAPALUS BEARDING THE LION. 
(The king of Ashur measures his strength with the king of the desert.) 


















































































































































Fig. 24. HuntinG FROM A Boat, 


22 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


(Fig. 21) and from his chariot (Fig. 22), but also in hand 
to hand combat (Fig. 23),—the King of Ashur measur- 


ing his strength with the king of the desert. 


EG 
Ups $e! 
iby W ifs 
Weg it be Ly Ny, 


Sh 


aN \ 
i If. 
iN / i ’ 
WANA eH Ailaains 
ANS Tp x 





e 


BK 
EUR 





¢ A\\\ . BP LA A) i A 
HeMIETTUL 


Fig 25. CaGep Lion SET FREE FOR THE CHASE. 





ae AS 


~ ARE 
Roar sees 
: 


AS AE 











Fig. 26. SERVANTS CARRYING FRuIT, HARES, PARTRIDGES, SPITTED 
GRASSHOPPERS, AND ONIONS. 


We catch glimpses of the preparations which were 
made for the royal meal (Figs. 26 and 27) ; we see the 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 23 


servants bringing hares, partridges, spitted grasshoppers, 
a plenitude of cakes and all manner of fruits, and carry- 
ing fresh branches for driving away the flies. We are 
even permitted to see on a bas-relief of the harem (Fig. 
28) the king and queen quaffing costly wine in a leafy 
bower, the king reclining on an elevated divan, the queen 
seated opposite him on a chair, and clothed in rich gar- 


ments. Eunuchs waft cooling breezes toward them from 







| 


: 











| 


Hey Ny 
I 






| 





Mi ) 
2 

YR! Ge 
ae | ) 








L 


Fig. 27. SLAVES CARRYING FRUIT 















their fans, while soft music from distant sources steals 
gently upon their ears (Fig. 29). This is the only queen 
of whom we possess a picture. Her profile as it appeared 
years ago in a better state of preservation has been saved 
for posterity by a sketch made in 1867 by Lieutenant, 
afterwards Colonel, Billerbeck (Fig. 30). This consort 
of Sardanapalus was apparently a princess of Aryan blood 
with blond hair. | 


Many other things of interest in Assyrian antiquity 


3ABEL AND BIBLE. 











G SARDANAPALUS AND His CONSORT. 


KIN 


Fig. 28. 





ING SARDANAPALUS AND His Consort. 


> 


ATTENDANTS UPON 


Fig. 29. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 25 


have also been restored to our bodily vision. The prophet 
Isaiah (xlvi. 1) mentions the procession of the idols, and 
in Fig. 31 we actually wit- 
ness one,—with the god- 
desses in front, and behind, 
the god of the weather 
armed with hammer and 
bolts; Assyrian soldiers 
have been commanded to 
transport the idols. 

We see in Figure 32 
how the statues of the 
gigantic stone bulls were 
transported, and catch in 





this way all manner of 
glimpses of the technical 


Fig. 30. CONSORT OF SARDANAPALUS. 
(From a sketch by Colonel Billerbeck.) 


knowledge of the Assy- 


rians. But our greatest and most constant delight is 









iat 


| kh GE 


Fig. 31. PROCESSION OF IDOLS. 


derived from the contemplation of their noble and simple 
architecture, as it is exhibited for example in the portal 


26 BABEL AND BIBLE. 





DIM 





Fig. 32. TRANSPORTATION OF THE GIGANTIC STONE BULLS. 


) 
a 


=o 
= 















































aguas 






























































































































































































































































































































































































































































Fig. 33. PorTAL OF THE PALACE OF SARGON. 


(Representing the noble style and simplicity of the Assyrian architecture. ) 


BABEL AND BIBLE. a 


of Sargon’s palace excavated by Botta (Fig. 33), or from 
the magnificent representations of animals, replete with 
the most startling realism, which these ‘‘ Dutchmen of 


) 


antiquity’? created. For example, the idyllic picture of 


the grazing antelopes (Fig. 13a; also Fig. 34), or the 


dying lioness of Nineveh, so justly renowned in art 


(sie. 35). 








Fig. 34. IpyLLic SCENES FROM ASSYRIAN ART. 


The excavations on Babylonian soil disclose in like 
manner the art and culture of the mother country of As- 
sytian civilisation far back in the fourth millennium,—a 
period which the boldest flights of fancy would otherwise 
have scarcely dreamt of recovering. We penetrate lastly 
here into the period of that primitive un-Indo-Germanic 
and likewise un-Semitic nation of Sumerians, who are 


28 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


the creators and originators of the great Babylonian civ- 
ilisation, of those Sumerians for whom the number 60 


and not 100 constituted the next higher unit after 10. 


=—SSSSSSSSESS 


SSS 


SSS = 


nig 


| 


Ni 





co 


mer We 


(TRA 
ids 
Fig. 35. THe DyinG Lioness oF NINEVEH. 


That Sumerian Priest-King whose magnificently pre- 
served head (Fig. 36) the Berlin Museum now shelters, 





Fig. 36. HEAD OF A SUMERIAN PRIEST-KING. 
(A noble type from the dawn of human history.) 


may unquestionably be characterised as a noble represen- 


tative of the human race from the twilight of history. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 29 


But gratifying and instructive as all these discov- 
eries may be, they have yet, so to speak, the significance 
of details and externalities only, and are easily surpassed 
in scope and importance by the revelations which it still 
remains for us to adduce. 

Iam not referring now to the highly important fact 
that the Babylonian and Assyrian methods of reckoning 
time, which were based on accurate astronomical observa- 
tions of solar eclipses, etc., enabled us to determine the 
chronology of the events narrated in the Book of Kings, 
—a circumstance that was doubly gratifying owing to the 
discovery of Robertson Smith and Wellhausen that the 
chronology of the Old Testament had been forcibly made 
to conform to a system of sacred numbers, which counted 
480 years from the end of the Exile back to the founding 
of the temple of Solomon, and again 480 years backward 
from that date to the Exodus of the children of Israel 
from Egypt (1 Kings vi. 1). 

I can also adduce in this place but a single, and that 
an inconspicuous, illustration of the far-reaching influence 
which the cuneiform investigations have exercised on our 
understanding of the text of the Old .-Testament,—a result 
due to the remarkably close affinity between the Baby- 
lonian and Hebrew languages and to the enormous com- 
pass of the Babylonian literature. We read in Numbers 
vi. 24-27: er ema Nu 

‘The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: The Lord 
make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto 
thee: The Lord ae up his countenance upon ace, and 
- give thee peace.”’ 

Countless times has this blessing been given and re- 


30 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


ceived! But it was never understood in its full depth 
and import until Babylonian usage informed us that ‘‘to 
lift up one’s countenance or eyes upon or to another,”’ 
was a form of speech for ‘‘ bestowing one’s love upon an- 
other, for gazing lovingly and feelingly upon another, as 
a bridegroom upon a bride, or a father upon ason.’’ This 
ancient and glorious benediction, therefore, invokes on 
man with increasing emphasis God’s blessing and protec- 
tion, God’s benignant and gracious consideration, and 
lastly God’s own love,—finally to break forth into that 
truly beautiful greeting of the Orient, ‘‘ Peace be with 
ele 

Yet the greatest and most unexpected service that 
Babel ever rendered the philological interpretation of the 
Bible must yield the palm for wide-reaching significance 
to the fact that here on the banks of the Euphrates and 
Tigris as early as 2250 B. C. we find a highly organtsed 
constitutional state. Here in these Babylonian lowlands, 
having an area not greater than that of Italy, yet extra- 
ordinarily rich by nature and transformed by human in- 
dustry into a veritable hotbed of productiveness, there 
existed in the third millennium before Christ @ czvzlsa- 
tion comparable in many respects with our own. 

It was Hammurabi, the Amraphel of the Bible, that 
ultimately succeeded in expelling the Elamites, the her- 
editary enemy of Babylon, from the country, and in weld- 
ing North and South together into a single union, with 
Babylon as political and religious center. His first solici- 
tude was to establish a uniform system of law over the 
entire country, and he accordingly promulgated a juridic 
code that determined in the minutest manner the rights 


BABEL AND BIBLE 31 


and privileges of his citizens. The relations of master, 
slave, and hireling, of merchant and apprentice, of land- 
lord and tenant, are here precisely fixed. There is a law, 
for example, that a clerk who has delivered money to his 
superior for goods that he has sold shall obtain a receipt 
for the transaction. Reductions in rent are provided for 
in case of damage by storms and wild beasts. ‘The fish- 
ing rights of boroughs along the canals are precisely de- 
fined. And so on. Babylon is the seat of the Supreme 
Court, to which all knotty and disputed points of law are 
submitted. Every able-bodied man is subject to military 
duty. But Hammurabi softened by many decisions the 
severity of the recruiting laws; for example, in the inter- 
ests of stock-raising he exempted herdsmen from military 
service, and he also conferred special privileges on an- 
cient priestly families. 

We read of money having been coined in Babylon, 
and the distinctively cursive character of their script 
points to a very extensive use of writing. Many letters 
of this ancient period have been preserved. We read, for 
example, the letter of a wife to her absent husband, ask- 
ing his advice on some trivial matter; the epistle of a 
son to his father, announcing that a certain person has 
unspeakably offended him, and that his impulse is to give 
the miscreant a severe drubbing, but that he prefers to 
have the advice of his father on the matter; and another, 
still stranger one, in which a son implores his father to 
send him at once the money that he has so long promised 
him, fortifying his request with the contumelious insin- 
uation that in that event only will he feel justified in re- 


suming his prayers for his father’s salvation. Every- 


OZ 





BABEL AND BIBLE. 























(After G. le Bon.) 


Imaginative Restoration. 


wy 


THe TEMPLES AND PALACES ON THE QUAYS OF BABYLON. 


37: 


‘io 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 3 


ww 


thing, in fact, points to a thoroughly organised postal 
system throughout the empire, and this conclusion is 
corroborated by the distinctest evidence that there existed 
causeways and canals in Babylonia which extended far 
beyond its boundaries and which were kept in perfect 
condition. 

Commerce and industry, stock-raising and agricul- 


ture, flourished here in an eminent degree, while science, 











Fig. 38. PaLacE oF KING SARGON AT KHORSABAD. 


(Restored by Victor Place.) 


geometry, mathematics, and notably astronomy, attained 
a height of development that has repeatedly evoked the 
admiration of modern scientists. Certainly not Paris, 
and at most Rome, can bear comparison with Babylon in 
the extent of influence which it exercised upon the world 
for 2000 years. 

Bitter testimony do the Sener of the Old Testa- 


34 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


ment bear to the surpassing splendor and unconquerable 
might of the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar (see Figs. 37, 
38, 39, 40, and 41). ‘‘ Babylon,”’ cries Jeremiah, “hath 
been a golden cup in Yahveh’s hand, that made all the 
earth drunken’”’ (Jer. li. 7); and the Revelation of St. 
John still quivers with the detested memory of Babel the 
Great, the gay voluptuous city, the wealth-teeming me- 
tropolis of commerce and art, the mother of harlots and 














Fig. 39. PALACE OF SENNACHERIB AT NINEVEH. 


(Imaginative Restoration. After Ferguson.) 


of all abominations of the earth. Yet so far back as the 
beginning of the third millennium before Christ Babylon 
had been this great focus of culture, science, and litera- 
ture, the ‘‘brain’’ of Hither’ Asia, the power that dom- 
inated the world. 

In the winter of 1887, a band of Egyptian fellahs 
who were excavating in the ruins of the palaces of Amen- 
ophis IV. at El-Amarna, between Thebes and Memphis, 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 55 


discovered about 300 clay tablets of many forms and 
sizes. ‘These tablets were found to contain the corre- 
spondence of Babylonian, Assyrian, and Mesopotamian 
kings with the Pharaohs Amenophis III. and IV., and, 
most important of all, the letters of the Egyptian gover- 
nors of the great Canaanite cities of Tyre, Sidon, Akko, 
Askalon, etc., to the Egyptian court; and the museum 
at Berlin is so fortunate as to possess the only letters that 





Fig. 4o. CHARIOT AND ATTENDANTS OF SENNACHERIB WITH CASTLE 
on A Mountain. (After Layard.) 


came from Jerusalem,—letters written before the entrance 
of the Israelites into the promised land. Like a powerful 
searchlight, these clay tablets of El-Amarna shed a flood 
of dazzling effulgence upon the profound obscurity which 
shrouded the political and cultural conditions of the period 
from 1500 to 1400 B.C.; and the mere fact that the mag- 
nates of Canaan, nay, even of Cyprus, made use of the 


(‘paekey) ‘uosn310,7 somef Aq y}9YS BV WOI ‘“WOI}eIO}SAY SAT}EUISeUIT “GAUYWIN AO SHOVIVG AH], ‘IP “BLY 






ie Serre 
j pide dS bbb at 





ia 











BABEL AND BIBLE. O/ 


Babylonian language and script, and like the Babylonians 
wrote on clay tablets, the mere fact that the Babylonian 
language was the official language of diplomatic inter- 
course from the Euphrates to the Nile, is in itself indis- 
putable proof of the omnipotent influence which Baby- 
lonian civilisation and literature exercised on the world 
from the year 2200 until 1400 B.C. 

When the twelve tribes of Israel invaded the land of 
Canaan, they entered a country whch belonged absolutely 
to the domain of Babylontan civilisation. It is an unim- 
portant but characteristic feature of the prevailing state 
of things that a Babylonish garment excited the avarice of 
Achan when the first Canaanite city, Jericho, was stormed 
and plundered (Joshua vii. 21). And not only the in- 
dustry, but also the commerce and law, the customs and 
the science of Babylon were the standards of the land. 
Knowing this, we comprehend at once why the systems 
of measures, weights, and coins used in the Old Testa- 
ment, and the external form of their laws (‘‘if a man do 
this or that, he shall be punished after this manner or 
that’’) are Babylonian throughout. So also the sacer- 
dotal customs and the methods of offering sacrifices were 
profoundly influenced by Babylonian models; and it is a 
remarkable fact that Israelitic traditions are altogether at 
variance in their accounts of the origin of the Sabbath,— 
as will be rendered apparent by a comparison of Exodus 
xx. 11 and Deuteronomy v. 15. But now the matter is 
clearer. 

The Babylonians also had their Sabbath day (sha- 
batiu), and a calendar of feasts and sacrifices has been 


unearthed according to which the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 


38 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


28th days of every month were set apart as days on which 
no work should be done, on which the king should not 
change his robes, nor mount his chariot, nor offer sacri- 
fices, nor render legal decisions, nor eat of boiled or 
roasted meats, on which not even a physician should lay 
hands on the sick. Now this setting apart of the sev- 
enth day for the propitiation of the gods is really under- 
stood from the Babylonian point of view, and there can 
therefore be scarcely the shadow of a doubt that in the 
last resort we are indebted to this ancient nation on the 
banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris for the plenitude 
of blessings that flows from our day of Sabbath or Sun- 
day rest. 

And more still. There is a priceless treasure in the 
Berlin Museum, a tablet of clay, containing the Babylo- | 
nian legend of how it came to pass that the first man for- 
feited the boon of immortality. The place where this 
tablet was found, namely El-Amarna in Egypt, and the 
numerous dots scattered over it in red Egyptian ink, 
showing the pains that some Egyptian scholar had taken 
to master the intricacies of the foreign text, are ocular 
evidence of the zeal with which the productions of Baby- 
lonian literature were cultivated over the vast extent of 
territory which stretched from Canaan to the land of the 
Pharaohs. Shall we be astonished, therefore, to learn 
that entire cycles of Biblical stories have been suddenly 
brought to light from the darkness of the Babylonian 
treasure-heaps, in much purer and more primitive form 
than they exist in the Bible itself? 

The Babylonians divided their history into two great 
periods: that before the Flood and that after the Flood. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 39 


Babylonia was in the true sense of the word the land of 
deluges. Like all alluvial lowlands bordering on great 
streams that flow into the sea, it was exposed to floods of 
the direst and most unique character. It is the home of 
the cyclone or tornado, with its accompaniment of earth- 
quake and cloudburst. Only twenty-five years ago, in 
the year 1876, a tornado of this character gathered in the 
Bay of Bengal, and amid the crashing of thunder and 
with a violence so terrific as to dismast ships distant 
nearly two hundred miles, approached the delta of the 
Ganges, met the ebbing tide, and engulfing it 1n 1ts own 
titanic tidal-wave, hurled oceans of water over an area of 
141 square leagues to a depth of 45 feet, drowning 215,000 
human beings, and only losing its strength as it broke 
against the highlands that lay beyond. Now the credit 
belongs: to the celebrated Viennese geologist, Eduard 
Suess, for having discovered the exact and detailed de- 
scription of just such a tornado in the Babylonian story 
of the Flood inscribed on this tablet (Fig. 42) from the 
library of Sardanapalus at Nineveh and committed to 
writing 2000 years before Christ. The sea plays the prin- 
cipal part in this flood, and therefore the ark of the Baby- 
lonian Noah, Xisuthros, is cast back upon a spur of the 
Armenio-Medean mountains; but in other respects it is 
the same old story of the Flood, so familiar to us all. 
Xisuthros receives from the god of the watery deep 
the command to build a ship of certain dimensions, to 
coat it thoroughly with pitch, and to put on board of it 
his entire family together with the seeds of all living 
things. The ship is entered, its doors are closed, it is 


cast adrift upon the devastating waves, and is finally 


40 BABEL, AND BIBLE. 


stranded upon a mountain bearing the name of Nizir. 
Then follows the famous passage: ‘‘On the seventh day 
I took forth a dove and released it; the dove flew hither 
and thither, but finding no resting-place returned.’’ We 
then read that a swallow was sent forth; it also found no 
resting-place and returned. Finally a raven was sent 
forth, which, noticing that the waters had subsided, did 


EYP» 
5h Lg DE BB SEN 
Wey cee 





Fig. 42. TaBLeET CONTAINING BABYLONIAN STORY OF THE FLOOD. 


not return. Xisuthros then abandons his ship and offers 
sacrifices on the summit of the mountain. The sweet 
odor was scented by the gods, etc., etc. 

This entire story, precisely as it is here written, 
afterwards travelled to Canaan, but owing to the totally 
different conformation of the land in this latter country, 
it was forgotten that the sea had played the principal réle, 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 414 


and we accordingly find 1n the Bible two distinct versions 
of the Flood, which are not only absolutely impossible 
from the point of view of natural science, but are also at 
diametrical variance with each other, the one giving as 
the duration of the Flood a period of 365 days and the 
other a period of 40+ (3X7), or 61 days. We owe the 
discovery that two fundamentally different versions of the 
story of the Flood were welded together into one in the 
Bible, to the orthodox Catholic body surgeon of Louis 
DXGVE> Jean Astruc, who, in the year 1753 first submitted, 
as Goethe expresses it, the books of Moses ‘‘to the probe 
and knife,’’ and thus became the founder of Pentateuch 
criticism, or that branch of inquiry which seeks to in- 
crease and clarify our knowledge of the many diversified 
sources of which the Five Books of Moses are composed. 

These are facts which from the point of view of sct- 
ence are as immutable as rock, however stubbornly people 
on both sides of the Atlantic may close their eyes to 
them. When we remember that minds of the stamp of 
Luther and Melancthon once contemptuously rejected the 
Copernican system of astronomy, we may be certain that 
the results of the scientific criticism of the Pentateuch 
will tarry long for recognition. Yet it is just as certain 
that some day they will be openly admitted. 

The ten Babylonian kings who reigned before the 
Flood have also been accepted in the Bible as the ten 
antediluvian patriarchs, and the agreement is perfect in 
all details. 

In addition to the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, the 


eleventh tablet of which contains the story of the Flood, 


42 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


we possess another beautiful Babylonian poem, the story 
of the Creation. 

In the primordial beginning of things, according to 
this epic, down in the gloomy chaos, surged and raged 
the primeval waters, the name of which was ‘Tiamat. 
When the gods declared their intention of forming an 
orderly cosmos out of the chaos, Tiamat arose (usually 
represented as a dragon, but also as a seven-headed ser- 
pent) ,and made ready for combat to the death. Monsters 
of all descriptions she spawned from her mighty depths, 
especially gigantic venom-blown serpents; and in their 
company she set forth bellowing and snorting to her con- 
flict with the gods. The Celestials quaked with terror 
when they saw their direful foe. The god Marduk alone, 
the god of light, of dawn, and of the vernal sun, came 
forward to do battle with her, his sole stipulation being 
that sovereign rank among the gods should be accorded 
him. 

Then follows a splendid scene. First the god Mar- 
duk fastened a gigantic net to the East and the South, to 
the North and the West, lest any part of Tiamat should 
escape. He then mounted in shining armor and radiant 
with majesty his celestial chariot, which was drawn by 
four spirited steeds, the admired cynosure of the eyes of 
all the surrounding gods. Straightway he made for the 
dragon and her dread embattled train, sending forth his 
challenge for the contest. Then Tiamat shrieked loudly 
and fiercely, till her deepmost foundations trembled and 
shook. She opened her maw to its uttermost, but before 
she could shut her ips Marduk made enter into her belly 
the evil hurricane. He seized his lance and pierced her 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 43 


heart. He cast her carcass down and placed himself upon 
it, whilst her helpers were taken captive and placed in 
close confinement. Thereupon Marduk cut Tiamat in 
twain, as cleanly as one would sever a fish, and of the 
one half he made the roof of heaven and of the other he 
made the earth; and the heaven he inlaid with the moon, 
and the sun, and the stars, and the earth he covered with 
plants and animals, until finally the first man and the 
first woman, made of mingled clay and celestial blood, 
came forth from the hand of their creator. 

Since Marduk was the city-god of Babel, it is quite 
intelligible that this story found widespread diffusion in 
Canaan. Nay, the poets and prophets of the Old Testa- 
ment went so far as to attribute directly to Yahveh the 
heroic deeds of Marduk, and to extol him as the cham- 
pion that broke the head of the dragons in the water 
(Psalms Ixxiv. 13 et seq.; Ixxxix. 10), and under whom 
the helpers of the dragon stooped (Job ix. 13). 

Passages like the following from Isaiah lh. 9: 


‘¢ Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of Yahveh; awake, 
as in the days of old, in the generations of ancient times. Art thou 


not it that hath cut Rahab in pieces and pierced the dragon?” 


or passages like that from Job xxvi. 12: 

‘¢He divideth the sea with his power, and by his understand- 
ing he smiteth the dragon,” 
read like explanatory comments on the little image which 
our expedition found representing the god Marduk, of 
the powerful arm, the far-seeing eye, and the far-hearing 
ear, the symbol of intelligence clad in majestic glory, 
with the conquered dragon of the primeval waters at his 
feet (Fig. 44). 










Ka TE Thar yas 
Sh why har 


Eb erp hs ug es 













Fig 44. MARDUK WITH THE CONQUERED 
DRAGON OF THE PRIMEVAL WATERS 
aT His FEET. 





- z a Dp oil EAE Se Be od a 
3 Sete gee FE FR; 

7 ee TE ps” fee's 
x a! oon 























Fg 
cages Gp Fine TL 
Rare Tacos 


ia s 
NM ptr ge aye <, 
Orarade chen Se 


Fig. 43. THe '' Brack Ove tisk.” ! Fig. 45. ConicaL PIECE OF CLAY FROM A 
(Lenormant, V., p. 329.) BABYLONIAN COFFIN. 


1 Erected by Shalmaneser II. (860-825 B.C.) to record the victories of his 31 military expeditions. 





BABEL AND BIBLE. 45 


The priestly author that wrote the first chapter of 
Genesis took infinite pains to eliminate all mythological 
features from his story of the creation of the world. But 
since his story begins with the gloomy, watery chaos 
which bears precisely the same name as Tiamat, namely 
Tehom, and since this chaos was first divided by the 
light, and heaven and the earth appeared afterwards, and 
heaven was set with the sun, the moon, and the stars, 
and the earth was covered with flowers and with animals, 
and finally the first man and woman went forth from the 
hand of God, it will be seen that there is a very close re- 
lationship between the Biblical and the Babylonian story 
of the creation of the world; and it will be obvious at the 
same time how absolutely futile all attempts are and will 
forever remain, to harmonise our Biblical story of the 
creation with the results of natural science. 

It is an interesting fact that echoes of this same con- 
flict between Marduk and Tiamat may still be heard in 
the Revelation of St. John the Divine, in the battle be- 
tween the archangel Michael and the beast of the deep, 
‘“that old serpent called the Devil and Satan.’’ This en- 
tire group of stories, which is also represented in the tale 
of St. George and the dragon, brought by the crusaders 
from the East, is distinctively Babylonian in character ; 
inasmuch as many, many hundred years before the Apoc- 
alypse and the first chapter of Genesis were written, we 
find this conflict between the powers of light and the 
powers of darkness renewed at the break of every day 
and the beginning of every spring, depicted in gorgeous 
relief on the walls of the Assyrian palaces (Fig. 46). 

But the discovery of this relationship is of still 


46 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


greater importance. The commandment not to do unto 
one’s neighbor what one would not like to have done unto 
oneself is indelibly engraven on every human heart. 
“Thou shalt not shed the blood of thy neighbor,’’ ‘‘thou 
shalt not draw near thy neighbor’s wife,’’ ‘‘thou shalt 
not take unto thyself the garment of thy neighbor,’’—all 
these fundamental postulates of the human instinct of 





Fig. 46. BatTLe BETWEEN MARDUK AND TIAMAT, THE POWERS OF LIGHT 
AND THE POWERS OF DARKNESS. 


(Ancient Assyrian bas-relief now in the British Museum.) 


self-preservation are read in the Babylonian records in 
precisely the same order as they are given in the fifth, 
sixth and seventh commandnients of the Old Testament. 

But man is also a social being, and for this reason the 
commandments of humanity, charity, mercy, and love, 
also form an inalienable patrimony of the human race. 
Therefore when a Babylonian Magus was called to a man 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 47 


who was ill and began to inquire what sin had stretched 
him on the sick-bed, he did not rest satisfied with the re- 
cital of the greater sins of commission like murder and 
robbery, but he asked: ‘‘ Hath this man refused to clothe 
one that was naked; or hath he refused light to one that 
was imprisoned?’’ ‘The Babylonian lays great stress, 
too, on the higher forms of human morality; speaking 
the truth and keeping one’s word were sacred duties with 
them, while to say ‘‘yes’’ with the lips and ‘‘no’’ with 
the heart was a punishable transgression. It is not sur- 
prising that infringements of these commandments were 
regarded by the Babylonians precisely as they were by 
the Hebrews, as szzs, for the Babylonians also in all their 
doings considered themselves as dependent on the gods. 
But it is certainly more remarkable that they also con- 
ceived all human afflictions, particularly sickness and 
death, as a funzshment for sins. In Babel as in the Bible, 
the notion of sin dominates everything. Under these 
circumstances it is intelligible that Babylonian thinkers 
also pondered deeply over the problem of how it was pos- 
sible that a creature that had been created in the image 
of God and was God’s own handiwork could have fallen a 
victim to sin and to death; and the Bible has a profound 
and beautiful story of the temptation of woman by the 
Senpent. 

The serpent again? That has an unmistakably Baby- 
lonian ring. It was doubtless the same serpent, the pri- 
mordial foe of the gods, that sought to revenge itself on 
the gods of light by seeking to estrange from them their 
noblest creature? Or was it the serpent of which it is 
once said that it ‘‘destroyed the dwelling-place of life’’? 


48 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


The question as to the origin of the Biblical story of the 
Fall of Man is of the utmost importance from the point 
of view of the history of religion as well as from that of 
the theology of the New Testament, which, as is well 
known, contrasts with the first Adam by whom sin and 
death were brought into the world, a second Adam. 

May I lift the veil, may I point to an old Babylonian 
cylinder-seal (Fig. 47), on which may be seen in the 
center a tree bearing pendent fruits, to the right a man, 
distinguishable by his 
























































































































































































































































bol of strength, to the left 
=| a woman, both with their 
























































° horns, which are the sym- 
SS : 7 (Ne XS 














































































































hands outstretched  to- 































































































ward the fruit, and be- 






































hind the woman the ser- 


Fig. 47. SAcRED TREE AND SERPENT. 
A Babylonian conception of the Fall of Man. pent? Is it not the very 


(After Smith.) acme of likelihood that 


there is some connection between this old Babylonian 
picture and the Biblical tale of the Fall of Man? 
Man dies, and while his body is buried in the grave 


‘‘the land of no return- 


his departed soul descends into 
ing,’’ into Sheol, into Hades, into the’ gloomy, dust 
impregnated locality, where the shades flutter around 
like birds and lead a joyless and sodden existence. Dust 
covers the doors and the bolts, and everything in which 
the heart of man took delight is mouldy and dust-laden. 

With such a disconsolate outlook it is intelligible 
that both Hebrews and Babylonians looked upon length 
of days here below as the sovereign boon; and on every 


single one of the great flag-stones with which the holy 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 49 


street of Marduk in Babylon was paved, and which was 
discovered by the German expedition to that city, there 
was engraved a prayer of Nebuchadnezzar which closed 
with the words: ‘‘O, Lord Marduk, grant to us great 
length of days!”’ 
But strange to say, the Babylonian conception of the 
Underworld is one degree pleasanter than that of the Old 
Testament. On the twelfth tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, 
the Babylonian Underworld is described in the minutest 
details. We read there of a space situated beneath the 
Underworld which was apparently reserved for souls of 
unusual piety and ‘‘in which they reposed on beds of 
ease and quaffed clear water.’’ 

Many Babylonian coffins have been found in Warka, 
Nippur, and Babel, but the Berlin Museum recently ac- 
quired a small conical piece of clay (Fig. 45), which has 
evidently been taken from a coffin of this kind, and the 
inscription of which plaintively requests that whosoever 
may find the coffin shall leave it undisturbed and unin- 
jured in its original resting-place; and the text concludes 
with words of blessing for him who performs so kind a 
deed: ‘‘ May his name be blessed in the Upperworld, and 
in the Underworld may his departed spirit drink of clear 
water.”” 

In Sheol, therefore, there exists a place for particu- 
larly pious souls, where they repose on beds of ease and 
quaff clear water. The remainder of Sheol, therefore, 
appears to be especially adapted to the needs of the im- 
pious and to be not only dusty but to be also without 
water, or at most furnishing ‘‘roily water,’’—in any 


event a place of thirst. 


50 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


In the Book of Job (xxiv. 18), which appears to be 
extremely conversant with Babylonian modes of thought, 
we find comparisons drawn between the arid, waterless 
desert which is reserved for those that have sinned, and 
the garden with fresh, clear water which is reserved for 
the pious. And in the New Testament, which has most 
curiously amalgamated this sentiment with the last verse 
of the Book of Isaiah, we read of a flaming hell in which 
the rich man languishes from want of water, and of a 
garden (for that is the meaning of Paradise) full of fresh, 
clear water for Lazarus. 

And the pictures which painters and poets, theo- 
logians and priests, and last of all Mahomet the prophet, 
have drawn of this Hell and this Paradise, are well 
known. 

Behold yonder poor Moslem, sick and feeble, who on 
account of his weakness has been abandoned by the cara- 
van in the desert. A jug filled with water is by his side. 
With his own hands he digs his shallow grave in the des- 
ert sands, resignedly awaiting his death. His eyes are 
aglow with expectation, for in a few moments angels will 
issue from the open portals of Paradise and greet him 
with the words: ‘‘ Selam ’alazka, thou hast been a god- 
fearing man; enter therefore for all eternity the garden 
that Allah has prepared for his own.’’ 

The garden stretches before him like the vast ex- 
panse of heaven and earth. Luxuriant groves casting 
plentiful shadows and laden with sweet fruits are inter- 
sected in all directions with babbling brooks and dotted 
with bubbling springs; while aerial bowers rise from the 
banks of the streams. Paradisian glory suffuses the 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 51 


countenances of the beatified ones, who are filled with 
happiness and serenity. ‘They wear green brocaded gar- 
ments made of the finest silk; their arms are adorned 
with gold and silver spangles; they lie on couches with 


lofty bolsters and soft pillows, and at their feet are 





thick carpets. So they rest, 
seated opposite one another 
at richly-furnished tables 


which offer them everything 





their hearts desire. Brim- 
ming goblets go the rounds, 
and youths endowed with 
immortality and resembling 
scattered pearls carry silver 
beakers and crystal vessels 
filled with Main, the most 
delicious and clearest water 
from the spring Tasnim, 
from which the archangels 
drink, redolent with cam- 


phor and ginger. And this 





water is mixed with the 





rarest old wine, of which Fig. 48. Assyrtan ANGEL. 
Type representing manly strength and 
intelligence. (Bas-relief of Kuyunjik. 


one pleases, for it does not Lenormant, IV., pp. 432-433.) 


inebriate and causes no headaches. 


one can drink as much as 


And then there are the maidens of Paradise! Maidens 
with skin as soft and delicate as the ostrich egg, with 
voluptuous bosoms, and with eyes like glittering pearls 
concealed in shells of oysters,—gazelle-like eyes full of 
chaste but enrapturing glances. Two and seventy of 


52 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


“a 


these Paradisian maidens may every god-fearing man 
choose unto himself, in addition to the wives that he pos- 
sessed on earth, provided he cares to have them (and the 
good man will always cherish desire for the good). All 
hatred and envy has departed from the breasts of the de- 
vout ones; no gossip, no slander, is heard in Paradise. 
‘ Selam, Selam/?’ everywhere; and all utterances con- 





Fig. 49. ANGELS wITH EaGLe Heaps. 


The Holy Tree in the Centre. (British Museum.) 


clude with the ringing words: e/-hamdu lillaht rabbi-l- 
‘alanun, the praise is the Lord’s, the master of all crea- 
bures. 

This is the culminating point in the development of 
that simple and unpretentious Babylonian conception of 
the crystal-clear water which god-fearing men were des- 
tined to drink in Sheol. _ And these conceptions of the 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 53 


torments of Hell and of the blissful pleasures of Paradise 
to-day sway the hearts of untold millions. 

It is well-known, also, that the conceptions of the 
messengers of the gods, or of the azge/s, with which the 
Egyptians were utterly unacquainted, are characteristi- 


cally Babylonian, and also that the conception of cheru- 





























Fig. 50. WiINnGED CHERUB, WiTH Bopy oF BULL anpD Human Heap 
(After Layard.) 


bim and seraphim and of the guardian angels that watch 
over the ways of men had its origin in Babylon. The 
Babylonian rulers stood in need of hosts of messengers 
to bear their behests into all quarters of their dominions; 


and so also their gods were obliged to have at their beck 


54 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


and call legions of messengers or angels,—messengers 
with the intelligence of men, and therefore having the 
form of men, but at the same time equipped with wings, 
in order to be able to carry through the winds of heaven 
the commands of the gods to the inhabitants of earth; in 
addition, these angels were invested with the keenness of 
vision and the rapidity of flight of the eagle; and to those 





Fig. 50a. WunGED CHERUB, wiTH Bopy oF Lion aNnD Human Heap 
(After Layard.) 


whose chief office it was to guard the entrance to their 
divine masters was imparted the unconquerable strength 
of the bull, or the awe-inspiring majesty of the lon. , 
(Figs. 48, 49, 50, and 50a.) 

The Babylonian and Assyrian angels, like those in 
Ezekiel’s vision, are very often of hybrid shape. ‘Take, 
for example, the cherubim of which a type is given in 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 55 


Fig. 50, with their wings, their bull’s bodies, and their 
honest, serious human countenances. Then again we 
find types like that discovered in the palace of Ashurna- 
zirpal (Fig. 51), which bears the closest possible resem- 
blance to our conception of angels. These noble and 
radiant figures, which art has rendered so attractive and 
familiar in our eyes, will always retain a kindly place in 
our hearts. 





Fig. 51. ANGELS wITH Human Heaps. 


(Noble types closely resembling the Christian conception of angels.) 


But the demons and the devzls, whether they take 
for us the form of the enemies of man or that of the 
primordial foes of God,—to these we were destined to bid 
farewell for all eternity, for the ancient Persian dualism 
was not after our hearts. ‘‘I form the light and create 
darkness: I make peace and create evil: z/ zs /, Yahveh, 
that do all these things.’? So justly declares the greatest 


56 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


prophet of the Old Testament, Isaiah (xlv. 7). Demons 
like that represented in Fig. 52,—though such pictures 
are not without interest for the history of duelling,—or 
caricatures like that represented in Fig. 53, may be com- 


Se renee gee seaiaamaa: Willi 
YU HNN RAI SS 
iy / WC ays CON) “) tp 
Wp 7 SONY fp 
|!) Saas 1k 


“ik Yi: 
Ye 


bi 
Vi 


SCUTT 
! =) ey, 
Ms (La, eV YY 


4 
“f 


SSS ene Za BE: RIE\// AZ El Se 
Wy Wy —=— ay Y= f., LORE — 
y/ yy PEELE BEEZ FWP ns pe NS yy YY hes 


LZ 
ne 


oe 


Fig. 52. Dur or LION-HEADED AND EaGLE-FOoTED DEMONS. 





(British Museum. After Lenormant.) 


mitted forever and aye to the obscurity of the Babylonian 
hills from which they have risen. (See also Fig. 54.) 
In his excavations at Khorsabad, Victor Place dis- 
covered the supply-depot of the palace of Sargon. One 
of the store-rooms contained pottery of all sorts and sizes, 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 57 


and another utensils and implements made of iron. Here 
were found arranged in beautiful order abundant supplies 
of chains, nails, plugs, mattocks, and hoes, and the iron 
had been so admirably wrought and was so well preserved 
that it rang like a bell when struck; and some of these 
implements which were then twenty-five centuries old 
could be forthwith put into 
actual use by the Arabian 
workmen. 

This drastic intrusion of 
Assyrian antiquity upon our 
own days naturally fills us 
with amazement, and yet it is 
nothing more than what has 
happened in the intellectual 
domain. When we distinguish 
the twelve signs of the zodiac 
and call them Aries, Taurus, 
Gemini, etc. (see Fig. 55), 
when we divide the circle into 
360 parts, the hour into 60 
minutes, and the minute into 





; Fig. 53. BasyLonian DEvix. 
60 seconds, and so on,—1n all Demon of the Southwest Wind. 


(Louvre. After Smith.) 


this, Sumerian and Babylo- 
nian civilisation still lives with us to-day. 

And possibly I have also been successful in my en- 
deavor to show that many Babylonian features still cling, 
through the medium of the Bible, to our religious think- 
ing. 

The elimination from our religious thought of the 


purely human conceptions derived from these admittedly 


58 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


talented peoples, and the liberation of our thought gen- 
erally from the shackies of deep-rooted prejudices, will in 
no wise impair true religion and the true religious spirit, 
as these have been taught us by the prophets and poets | 
of the Old Testament, but most sublimely of all by 
Jesus; on the contrary, both will come forth from this 








sy 
Mu GRY iat ff Haine 


sige ws Ss DTD el 
Ki vibes Wa x ay 


aaaihdaen Ny 





TATRA 
dtc 


Fig. 54. A Demon SupporTING A TABLET.! 


(Assyrian bronze tablet. After Lenormant.) 


process of purification far truer and far more intensified 
than ever they were before. 

I may be allowed finally a word with regard to the 

feature that invests the Bible with its main significance 

1 The two upper horizontal strips in the left-hand side of the figure represent 

the heavens (the celestial bodies and the celestial genii). The third strip exhibits 


a funeral scene on earth. The fourth strip represents the Underworld bathed in 
the floods of the ocean. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 59 


from the point of view of general history,—its monothe- 
zsmt. Here too Babel early opened a new and undreamt-of 
prospect. 

It is remarkable, but no one can definitely say what 
our Teutonic word God originally signified. Philologists 
vacillate between ‘‘inspiring timidity’? and ‘‘delibera- 


tion.’’ But the word which the Semitic Canaanite races, 





Fig. 55. SAGITTARIUS AND SCORPIO. 


Signs of the Zodiac, as represented by the Babylonians. (Lenormant, V., p. 180.) 


to whom the Babylonians are most nearly related and 
from whom the Israelites afterward sprang, coined for 
God, is not only lucid as to its meaning, but conceives 
the notion of divinity under so profound and exalted a 
form that this word alone suffices to shatter the legend 
that ‘‘the Semites were, time out of mind, amazingly 
deficient in religious instinct ;’’ while it also refutes the 


60 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


popular modern conception that the religion of Yahveh, 
and therefore also our Christian belief in God, is ulti- 
mately sprung from a species of fetishism and animism 
such as is common among the South Sea cannibals or the 
inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. 

There is a remarkably beautiful passage in the Ko- 
ran, VI, 75 et seq., which so fascinated Goethe that he 
expressed the desire to see it dramatised. Mahomet has 
mentally put himself in the place of Abraham, and is 
endeavoring to realise the manner in which Abraham had 
reached the monotheistic idea. He says: ‘‘And when 
the gloom of night had fallen, Abraham stepped forth 
into the darkness; and behold, there was a star shining 
above him. ‘Then he cried out in his gladness: ‘This is 
my Lord! But when the star grew dim, he said: “I 
love not those that grow dim.’ And when the moon rose 
radiantly in the firmament, he cried out in exceeding 
gladness: ‘This is my Lord!’ But when it set, he said: 
‘Alas, I shall surely be one of the people that must needs 


> But when the sun rose dazzlingly in the morning, 


err. 
he said: ‘This is my Lord, this is the greatest of all!’ 
But when the sun set, then he said: ‘O, my people, 
verily Iam rid of your idolatry of many gods, and I lift 
up nly countenance to him alone that created the heavens 
and the earth.’ ”’ 

That ancient Semitic word for God, so well known 
to us from the sentence, EZ Elz lama azabtant,is El, 
and its meaning is ¢he goal; the goal toward which are 
directed the eyes of all men that look Heavenward only, 
‘‘ which every man sees, which every man beholds from 


afar’? (Job xxxvi. 25); the goal to which man stretches 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 61 


forth his hands, for which the human heart longs as its 
release from the uncertainties and imperfections of this 
earthly life,—this goal the ancient Semitic nomads called 
El, or God. And inasmuch as there can in the nature of 
things be only one goal, we find among the old Canaanite 
races which settled in Babylonia as early as 2500 years 
before Christ, and to whom Hammurabi himself be- 
longed, such beautiful proper names as ‘‘God hath 
given,’’ ‘‘God be with thee,’’ ‘* With the help of my God 
I go my way,’’ etc. 





Fig. 56. Cray TasLets CONTAINING THE WorpDsS ‘' YAHVEH IS Gop,” 


(Time of Hammurabi or Amraphel. British Museum.) 


But more! ‘Through the kindness of the director of 
the Egyptian and Assyrian department of the British 
Museum I am able to show you here pictures of three 
little clay tablets (Fig. 56). What, will be asked, is to 
be seen on these tablets, fragile broken pieces of clay, 
with scarcely legible characters scratched on their sur- 
face? True enough, but they are valuable from the fact 
that their date may be exactly fixed as that of the time of 
Hammurabi, one of them having been made during the 
reign of his father, Sin-muballit; but still more so from 


62 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


the circumstance that they contain three names which 
are of the very greatest significance from the point of 
view of the history of religion. ‘They are the words: 
BT MS AL woh 
fla- ah- ve- ila 
Eel 
a 3 a71- a 
Yahueh 1s God. Yahveh, the Abiding One, the Perma- 
nent One (for such is, as we have reason to believe, the 
significance of the name), who, unlike man, is not to- 
morrow a thing of the past, but one that endures forever, 
that lives and labors for all eternity above the broad, re- 
splendent, law-bound canopy of the stars,—it was this 
Yahveh that constituted the primordial patrimony of 
those Canaanite tribes from which centuries afterward 
the twelve tribes of Israel sprang. 

The religion of the Canaanite tribes that emigrated 
to Babylonia rapidly succumbed, indeed, before the poly- 
theism that had been practised for centuries by the an- 
cient inhabitants of that country. But this polytheism 
by no means strikes an unsympathetic chord-in us, at 
least so far as its conception of its gods is concerned, all 
of whom were living, omnipotent, and omnipresent be- 
ings that hearkened unto the prayers of men, and who, 
however much incensed they might become at the sins of 
men, were always immediately ready again with offers of 
mercy and reconciliation. And likewise the representa- 
tions which these deities found in Babylonian art, as for 
instance that of the sun-god of Sippar enthroned in his 


Holy of Holies (Fig. 57)' are far removed from every- 
1See also Fig. 31. 


Fig. 57. 


Tue SuN-GoD OF SIPPAR ENTHRONED IN His HOLy OF HO.iEs. 


(Lenormant, V., Pp. 301.) 


= a wa ~ 
Tuas 2EPeP AS Srey 


! 





ua 


64 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


thing that savors of the ugly, the ignoble, or the gro- 
tesque. The Prophet Ezekiel (chap. i.) in his visions of 
his Lord saw God enter on a living chariot formed of four 
winged creatures with the face of a man, a lion, an ox, 
and an eagle, and on the heads of these cherubim he saw 
(x. 1) acrystal surface supporting a sapphire throne on 
which God was seated in the likeness of a man, bathed in 
the most resplendent radiance. Noting carefully these 





Fig. 58. BaByLONIAN CYLINDER-SEAL WITH REPRESENTATION 
RESEMBLING THE VISION OF EZEKIEL. 


details, can we fail to observe the striking resemblance 
which his vision presents to the representation of a god 
which has been found on a very ancient Babylonian cyl- 
inder-seal (Fig. 58)? Standing on an odd sort of vessel, 
the prow and stern of which terminate in seated human 
figures, may be seen two cherubim with their backs to. 
each other and with their faces, which are human in form, 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 65 


turned to the front. ‘Their attitude leads us to infer that 
there are two corresponding figures at the rear. On their 
backs reposes a surface, and on this surface stands a 
throne on which the god sits, bearded and clothed in long 
robes, with a tiara on his head, and in his right hand 
what are apparently a scepter and a ring: and behind the 
throne, standing ready to answer his beck and call, is a 
servitor of the god, who may be likened to the man 
clothed with linen’’ (Ezekiel ix. 3, and x. 2) that exe- 
cuted the behests of Yahveh. 

Notwithstanding all this, however, and despite the 
fact that many liberal and enlightened minds openly ad- 
vocated the doctrine that Nergal and Nebo, that the 
moon-god and the sun-god, the god of thunder Ramman, 
and all the rest of the Babylonian Pantheon were one in 
Marduk, the god of light, still polytheism, gross poly- 


theism, remained for ¢iree thousand years the Babylonian 





state religion,—a sad and significant warning against the 
indolence of men and races in matters of religion, and 
against the colossal power which may be acquired by a 
strongly organised priesthood based upon it. 

Even the religion of Yahveh, under the magic stand- 
ard of which Moses united into a single nation the twelve 
nomadic tribes of Israel, remained infected for centuries 
with all manner of human infirmities,—with all the un- 
sophisticated anthropomorphic conceptions that are char- 
acteristic of the childhood of the human race, with Israel- 
itic particularism, with heathen sacrificial customs, and 
with the cult of legal externalities. Even its intrinsic 
worth was impotent to restrain the nation from worship- 


ping the Baal and the Astarte of the indigenous Canaan- 


66 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


ite race, until those titanic minds, the prophets, discov- 
ered in Yahveh the god of the universe, and pleaded for 
a quickening of the inner spirit of religion with exhorta- 
tions like that of Joel, ‘‘to rend their hearts and not their 


” and until the divinely endowed singers of the 


garments, 
Psalms expressed the concepts of the prophetic leaders in 
verses which awaken to this day a living echo in the 
hearts of all nations and times,—until, in fine, the proph- 
ets and the psalmists paved the way for the adhortation 
of Jesus to pray to God in spirit and truth and to strive 
by dint of individual moral endeavor in all spheres of life 
after higher and higher perfection,—after that perfection 


which is our Father’s in Heaven. 


SeeCOND LECTURE 





IN EXPLANATION. 


\ \ 7HO is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah ? 
This that is glorious in his apparel, marching in the greatness of his 
strength ? 

“Tt is I (Yahveh) that speak in righteousness, mighty to save.” 

Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth 
in the winefat ? 

“‘T have trodden the winepress alone; and of the peoples there was no man 
with me: 

Yea, I trod them in mine anger, and trampled them in my fury ; 

And their lifeblood is sprinkled upon my garments, and I have stained all my 
raiment. 

For the day of vengeance was in mine heart, and the year of my redemption was 
come. 

And I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was none to 
uphold : 

Therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me, and my fury, it upheld me. 

And I trod down the peoples in anger, and made them drunk with my fury, 


And I poured out their lifeblood on the earth. 

In language, style, and sentiment, forsooth a genuine Bedouin 
song of battle and victory! Not at all! This utterance of Isaiah 
Ixiii. 1-6, and a hundred other prophetic utterances full of inex- 
tinguishable hatred toward the races round about: toward Edom 
and Moab, Asohu and Babel, Tyre and Egypt, mostly masterpieces 
of Hebrew rhetoric, are to be accepted as representing the ethical 
prophetism of Israel, and this at its high tide! These outpourings 
of political jealousy and of passionate hatred on the part of long 
vanished generations, born of certain contemporary conditions and 
perhaps comprehensible from a merely human standpoint, must 


gerve us children of the twentieth century after Christ, must serve 


70 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


even Occidental and Christian races, as a religious guide for refine- 
ment and edification! Instead of losing ourselves ‘‘in grateful 
admiration” in the contemplation of God’s manifestation in our 
own people, from primitive Germanic times down to the present 
day, we continue, from ignorance, indifference or blindness, to 
concede to those early Israelitic oracles the character of a ‘‘revela- 
tion,’’ which cannot be justified either in the light of science or in 
that of religion or of ethics. 

The more deeply I dive into the spirit of the prophetic writ- 
ings of the Old Testament, the more I shrink from Yahveh, who 
slaughters the nations with the insatiable sword of his wrath, who 
has but one favorite child, and surrenders all other nations to night 
and shame and destruction, who said even to Abraham (Genesis 
xu. 2): ‘‘I will bless them who bless thee, and those who curse 
thee, them will I curse ””—and I seek refuge with him who taught 
in life and in death: ‘‘ Bless them that curse you,” and I hide, full 
of trust and joy and earnest longing for moral perfection, in the 
God to whom Jesus taught us to pray, the God who is a loving and 


just father to all men on earth. 


CHARLOTTENBURG, May I, 1903. 


SHCOND LECTURE. 


‘Babel and Bible’’ when 


HY this opposition to 

logic itself compels this sequence of the words? 

And how can anyone expect to be able to suppress these 
serious questions, which involve the entire Bible with the 


’ when this is shown 


catchword ‘‘ Primitive Revelation,’ 
to be false by a single forgotten verse of the Old Testa- 
ment? And does in fact ‘‘the ethical monotheism of Is- 
rael’’ in its function as ‘‘a real revelation of the living 
God,’’ constitute the unassailable bulwark in the conflict 
of opinions which Babel has aroused in these later days? 

It is a pity that so many people permit their delight 
in the great advantage which Babel is constantly offering 
us as ‘‘interpreter and illustrator’’ of the Bible to be 
spoiled by a narrow regard for dogmatic questions to such 
a degree that they even entirely ignore that advantage. 
And yet, how grateful all readers of and commentators 
on the Bible must needs be for the new knowledge which 
has been revealed, and is constantly being revealed, to us 
by the laborious excavations among the ruins of Babylon 
and Assyria! 

On principle I too avoid continually speaking of 
‘confirmations’? of the Bible. For indeed the Old Tes- 


tament as a source of ancient history would be in a bad 


12 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


a 


case if it required everywhere confirmation by cuneiform 
inscriptions. But when the Biblical Books of Kings (2 





Pees .* 
Fig. 59. THE Ruins aT TELL IsRAuiM, SITE OF THE CITY OF Kur: 


Kings xvii. 30) states that the inhabitants of th 
Kutha who settled in Samaria worshipped the god 1 




















Fig. 60. NERGAL, THE PaTRON Gop oF KuTHAa. 


and we now know, not alone that this Babylonian city of 
Kutha (Fig. 59) lies buried under the ruins at Tell Ibra- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 73 


him, twenty-one miles northeast of Babylon, but also that 


a cuneiform inscription expressly informs us that the 
patron god of Kutha was called Nergal (Fig. 60) ,—this 


s really valuable information. 










- While there seemed to be no prospect of ever dis- 
ering the town and district of Chalach, to which a 
Israelites taken captive by Sargon were 


Poti es: | 
.. feostith 
Bester 
: peer at FG 

rare” Beer am 
Eee 
ie ergs pee 


f 
ee 
i 
























‘ig.61. BLack OBELISK Fig. 62. AssyrIAN LETTER. 


OF SHALMANESER II. Written from Chalach, the Babylonian home of 
the exiled Israelites. 


transplanted (2 Kings xvii. 6; xviii. 11), we now pos- 
sess, from the library of Asurbanipal at Nineveh, a letter 
written from Chalach (Fig. 62), in which a certain Mar- 
duk-nadin-achi, laying emphasis upon his steadily mani- 
fested loyalty, petitions the king to help him regain his 
estate, which had been given him by the king’s father, 
and which had supported him for fourteen years until at 


SD Pr 

ee , 

pe Ag ba 

Shaw. es TS 
24h (| Poh 
x ie 

ab 


hi 7 
a: 1 
7 oo 


nk BS 


Py), Baar 


7 


N\ he 


BIEW pet 




















oy ify 


* 


eae aes 


7) 
Qua 
3 peas 











hig 
t galas 
iti ‘% 


= 


I 
7 
\ d 
ee 
ole 
= 


OTT 
: 
















”, 


- Ue oe | Hs - coy , 

\ iy 
i J : F 
een / s < 

J i= AS 
HHT << 35 
si J |EH 

| Ng i, = 
Nq Se 

% J 
NE 
i a ane 
~ Sy | 
ees 

















a A 


wy PT ERRT AL 







LESS 


LRA 
ESS 


a 
cS 
Lcssssssss8 









i 


Tey 











a. 





Dif 


——— 






LEST F 











zal 























2 


iE 


oo 


STE 


ay, 
7 | 






ce 






















pe Kast ayy Fg 
= =a 


ant 
' 


Ad 


ToT 
ee 





Fig. 65. 


BY py) 
SBN: 
py 





er ii 
yyy cid fl 


x Hf 
Pp Es 

F mm 5 
E| 13 
2 / 








= — 


78 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


last the governor of the land of Mashalzi had taken it 
from him. 

As to the inhabitants of the northern kingdom of 
Israel, who are presented to ou1 eyes so vividly by the 
famous black obelisk of Shalmaneser II. (Fig. 61) in its 
second row of relief figures (Figs. 63-66)—they are the 
ambassadors of King Jehu (840 B.C.) with gifts of vari- 


ous sorts,—we now know all three 





of the localities where the ten tribes 
found their grave: Chalach, some- 
what farther east than the moun- 
tainous source of the upper Zab, 
called Arrapachitis; the province 
of Goshen along the Chabor prob- 
ably not far from Nisibis; and 
thirdly, the villages of Media. 
Until recent times the con- 
quest and plundering of Egyptian 
Thebes mentioned by the prophet 
Nahum (iii. 8 ff.) has been a 
puzzle, so that no one knew to 





what the words of the prophet re- 
Fig. 67. Assursanipat’s Ten- ferred: 

ao a ee ‘Art thou (Nineveh) better 
than No-amon (i. e., Thebes), that is situate in the 
waters of the Nile, with waters round about her.. .? 
Yet was she carried away, she went into captivity; her 
young children were dashed in pieces at the top of all 
the streets, and they cast lots for her honorable men, and 
all her great men were bound in chains.”’ 

But then there was discovered at Nineveh the mag- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 79 


nificent ten-sided clay prism of Asurbanipal (Fig. 67), 
which reports in its second column that it was Asurbani- 
pal who, pursuing the Egyptian king Urdamané from 
Memphis, reached Thebes, conquered it and carried away 
silver, gold, and precious stones, the entire treasure of 
the palace, the inhabitants, male and female, a great and 
immeasurable booty, from Thebes to Nineveh the city 
of his dominion. 


And how much the language of the Old Testament 















































Fig. 68. ANTELOPE LEUKORYX. 


is indebted to the cuneiform literature! The Old Testa- 
ment mentions repeatedly an animal called re’em, a fierce, 
untamable animal armed with fearful horns (Psalms xxii. 
22) and most nearly related to the ox (Deuteronomy 
Motiv / = Psalms xxix. 6; comp. Isaiah xxxiv. 7), to 
use which in field labor on the plain like a common ox 
seems to the poet of the Book of Job (xxxix. 9 ff.) a ter- 
rible, an inconceivable thought: ‘‘ Will the wild ox be 


content to serve thee, or will he abide by thy crib? Canst 


80 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


thou bind the wild ox with his guiding-band in thy fur- 
row? Or will he harrow the valleys after thee?’’ 
Despite the fact that the buffalo now roams in herds 
the forests beyond the Jordan, it was nevertheless diffused 
over Asia Minor from Arachosia only a short time before 
the beginning of our era; hence it had become customary 
as a result of comparison with Arabian usage, which 
styles the antelopes ‘‘cattle of the desert’’ and applies 
the name 77’ to antrlope leukoryx (Fig. 68), to under- 





Fig. 69. THE Re’em, or WILD Butt. 


(After a bas-relief in the palace of Sennacherib.) 


stand under the Hebrew re’em this species of antelope. 
But as this antelope, despite its long, sharp horns, is a 
slender-limbed and soft-eyed creature, it was beyond com- 
prehension how it should occur to a poet to imagine it 
hitched to a plow and then to shudder at the thought. 
The cuneiform inscriptions have informed us what 
the 7ému is: it is the powerful, fierce-eyed, wild ox with 
stout curved horns, an animal of the wood and the moun- 


tain, which scales the highest summits, an animal of tre- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. $1 


mendous physical strength, the chase for which, like that 
for the lion, was especially popular with the Assyrian 
kings on account of its hazardousness. The presence of 





Fig. 70. HUNTING THE RE’EM. 


this animal, which is most closely related to the dos urus 
of Ceesar (Bell. Gall. VI. 28) and to the wzsext (bison) 



































Fig. 71. THE HILv oF BABIL. 


of Middle-High-German literature, is scientifically estab- 
lished for the region of Mt. Lebanon: the cuneiform in- 
scriptions mention the ré’em countless times, and the 
alabaster reliefs of the Assyrian royal palace present it 


very clearly to our eyes. (Fig. 69.) 


‘NOTAAVG dO SNINY AHL ONIAV] ‘SALVYHdNG AHL AO SHNVG GaUuaaUog-Wivd AHL ‘24 ‘317 





rst HL agi 17acaNW azsnyna” 2 TWH ile a 


USVY 148 TY TIA V S 
ITY Ne BW. 9NIN79 Das 

-". 2 ODuway wg An 

6 ter, 4 
oo ete rT — 














amma a eee a= 5 
p SS Se SE SS Se Ee ees PLGA 
Bie Sate ay ee AS Pane one eee EP 
PPE a a = : Sa ee, CX 3 a 2 
oh = pcs a P e SF fc 
bs 4 4 an fs = abe , Es. Fi acmstnied Bem , 
| ST md Vicihe on paperinzinyrree” oi: ia g LL nh Se hd Spill 
pw ise omg < > a : Anan Ie 
aaah 








tei." 


ia 





\' 





N) 
edt 





: a. | TE aE, 
4 aii: gh MER Tey eth Rae 
SD OS Pear pies Oe E~ Se a > 











BABEL AND BIBLE. 83 


King Nebuchadnezzar reports that he adorned the 
city gate of Babylon which is dedicated to the goddess 
Istar with burned bricks upon which were represented 
rémus and gigantic serpents standing upright. The re- 
discovery of this Istar Gate and its excavation to a depth 
of fourteen meters, where the underflow begins, consti- 
tutes one of the most valuable achievements of recent 
years in our exploration of the ruins of Babylon. 

Hail to thee, thou hill of Babil (Fig. 71), and to all 
thy fellows on the palm-bordered banks of the Euphrates! 





Fig. 73. THE WILD BULL (RE’EM) ON THE IsTAR GarTE. 


Brick mosaic in enameled colors. 


(Fig. 72.) How the heartbeats quicken when, after 
weeks of picking and shoveling under the glowing sun- 
beams of the East, suddenly the structure that has been 
sought is revealed, when upon a giant block of stone cov- 
ered with characters the name ‘‘Istar Gate’’ is read, and 
gradually the great double gate of Babylon, flanked 
northward on each side by three mighty towers, rises in 
a splendid state of preservation from the bowels of the 


84 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


earth! And wherever you may look, on the surfaces of 
the towers as well as upon the inner walls of the gate- 
way, droves of rémus carved in relief, the uppermost row 
in brilliant contemporary enamel, standing forth in fasci- 
nating splendor of colors against the deep blue back- 
eround. (Fig. 73.) 

‘‘Vigorously strides the wild ox with long paces, 
with proudly curved neck, with horns pointed threaten- 
ingly forward, ears laid back, and inflated nostrils; his 





Fig. 74. THE Lion oF BABYLON. 


Brick mosaic in enameled colors. 


muscles are tense and swelling, his tail raised and yet 
falling stiffly downwards,—all as in Nature, but ideal- 
ised.’?* Where the smooth hide is white, horns and hoofs 
shine like gold; where the hide is yellow, these are of 





malachite green, while in both kinds the long hair is col- 
ored dark blue. But a truly imposing effect is produced 
by a white ox in relief, in which the long hair, as well as 
the horns and hoofs, is tinted a delicate green. ‘Thus 


' From a treatise on these relief figures by Walter Andre. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 85 


the re’em of the Istar Gate through which led the tri- 
umphal highway of Marduk proves to be a worthy com- 
panion for the widely known ‘‘lion of Babylon’’ which 
adorned the triumphal highway itself. (Fig. 74.) 

And Biblical science is enriched by still another ani- 
mal of the strangest sort, a fabulous animal, familiar to 
us from the days of our youthful religious instruction, 
and which could not fail to make a fascinating impression 
upon all who passed through the Istar Gate toward the 





Fig. 75. THE DRAGON OF BABEL. 


Enameled brick mosaic. 


palace of Nebuchadnezzar,—I refer to the Dragon of Ba- 
bel. (Fig. 75.) ‘‘ With neck stretched far forward and 
looks darting poison the monster marches along,’’—it is 
a serpent, as is shown by the elongated head with its 
forked tongue, the long, scale-covered trunk and the 
wriggling tail, but at the same time it has the fore-legs 
of the panther while its hind-legs are armed with mon- 
strous talons; in addition to all this it has on its head 


long, straight horns and a scorpion’s sting in the end of 


86 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


its tail. ‘Thanks are due to all whose faithful labor con- 
tributes to secure such choice and exceedingly important 
archeological treasures! 

Quite apart from many such individual interpreta- 
tions and illustrations, Assyriology is restoring confi- 
dence in the authenticity of the text of the Old Testa- 
ment, which has for some time been so violently assailed. 
For, finding itself constantly face to face with more and 
more difficult texts full of rare words and phrases, it real- 
ises that there are also in the Old Testament scriptures 
great numbers of rare and even unique words and phrases ; 
it takes delight in these, attempts to interpret them from 
their context, and in not a few cases finds its efforts re- 
warded by the presence of these very same words and 
phrases in Assyrian. In this manner it recognises what 
a fatal error it is on the part of modern exegesis to make 
conjectural interpretations of such rare words and diff- 
cult phrases, to ‘‘emend’’ them, and only too frequently 
to replace them with meaningless substitutes. In truth 
every friend of the Old Testament Scriptures should as- 
sist with all his might in bringing to light the thousands 
of clay tablets and all other sorts of written monuments 
that lie buried in Babylon, and which our expedition will 
bring to light as soon as the first objects set before it are 
accomplished, thereby making possible for the textual 
interpretation of the Old Testament more rapid and more 
important progress than it has experienced within the 
two thousand years preceding. 

Indeed, entire narratives of the Old Testament re- 
ceive their interpretation from Babylon. In our early 
youth we inherit the burden of the foolish notion of a 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 8/7 


~ 


Nebuchadnezzar who was turned into a beast; for the 
Book of Daniel tells us (iv. 26-34) how the King of 
Babylon walked upon the roof of his palace, and after 
feasting his eyes once more on the splendor of the city 
he had built, received from heaven the prophecy that he 
should live, an exile from among men, with the beasts of 
the field and after the fashion of the beasts. Thereupon, 
according to account, Nebuchadnezzar ate grass in the 
wilderness like unto an ox, wet by the dew of heaven, 
while his hair grew like unto the feathers of the eagle and 
his finger-nails like unto birds’ claws. 

Yet no educator of youth should ever have ventured 
to teach such things, and especially not after the appear- 
ance of Eberhard Schrader’s treatise on Zhe /nsantty of 
Nebuchadnezzar, without at the same time pointing out 
the fact that the purer and more primitive form of this 
story has long been known in a Chaldean legend trans- 
mitted to usin Abydenus. This tells us that Nebuchad- 
nezzar, after reaching the zenith of his power, went out 
upon the roof of his palace, inspired by a god, he ex- 
claimed: ‘‘I here, Nabuchodrosor, announce to you the 
coming of the calamity which neither Bel nor Queen 
Beltis can persuade the Fates to avert. Perses (that is, 
Cyrus) will come... and bring servitude upon you. O 
would that he, before my fellow-citizens perish, might be 
driven through the desert, where neither cities nor the 
track of men can be found, but where wild beasts graze 
and birds fly about, while he wanders about solitary in 
caves and gorges. But may a better lot .. . befall me.’’ 

Who could fail to perceive in this that the Hebrew 
writer has made a free version of the Babylonian legend, 


88 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


especially since he lets us see plainly in verse 16 that the 
very wording of the original was quite familiar to him! 
What Nebuchadnezzar wishes for the enemy of the Chal- 
deeans, this the author of the pamphlets full of errors and 
carelessness which are combined to make the Book of 
Daniel, has Nebuchadnezzar suffer himself, in order to 
exemplify as drastically as possible to his countrymen, 
who were being persecuted by Antiochus Epiphanes, the 
truth that God the Lord is able to humble deeply even 
the mightiest king who rebels against Yahveh. 

When shall we finally learn to distinguish the form 
from the content even within the covers of the Old Tes- 
tament? 

The author of the Book of Jonah preaches to us two 
lofty doctrines: that no one can escape from God, and 
that no mortal dare presume to dictate terms to God’s 
mercy and patience, or even to set limits forthem. But 
the form in which these truths are clothed is human, is 
fancifully Oriental, and if we should continue to believe 
to-day that Jonah while in the whale’s belly prayed a 
conglomeration of passages from the Psalms, part of which 
were not composed until several centuries after the de- 
struction of Nineveh, or that the King of Nineveh did 
such deep penance that he gave commands even to oxen 
and sheep to put on sackcloth, we should be sinning 
against the reason bestowed upon us by God. 

But all these are details which sink into insignifi- 
cance under an intenser light. 

It was an exceedingly happy thought which struck 
the representatives of the various German ecclesiastical 
bodies who went to Jerusalem as guests of the German 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 89 


Emperor to take part in the dedication of the Church of 
Our Saviour, that of founding in Jerusalem a ‘‘ German 
Evangelical Institute for the Archeology of the Holy 
Land.’’ O would that our young theologians might go 
thither, and not merely in the cities, but better still out 
in the desert, familiarise themselves with the manners 
and customs of the Bedouins, which are still so com- 
pletely the same as in the times of Ancient Israel, and 
plunge deeply into the Oriental mode of thought and ex- 
pression: might listen to the story-tellers in the tents of 
the desert or hear the descriptions and accounts of the 
sons of the desert themselves, full of fancy that bubbles 
up vigorously and unhampered and only too often ex- 
ceeds unconsciously the bounds of fact! 

And if even the modern Orient, wherever we go and 
listen and look, furnishes such an abundance of sugges- 
tions for the interpretation of the Bible, how much more 
will this be the case with the study of the ancient litera- 
ture of the Babylonians and Assyrians which is in part 
contemporary with the Old Testament! Everywhere 
there are more or less important agreements between the 
two literatures which are most closely related in language 
and style, in mode of thought and expression. 

I will cite here the sacredness of the number seven 
as well as that of the number three, for which we have 
evidence in both literatures: ‘‘ Land, land, land, hear the 
word of the Lord,’’ exclaims Jeremiah (xxii. 29) ; ‘‘ Hail, 
hail, hail to the king, my lord,’’ more than one Assyrian 
scribe begins his letter. And as the seraphim before the 
throne of God call one to another: ‘‘ Holy, holy, holy is 
Yahveh Zebaoth’’ (Isaiah vi. 3), so we read at the be- 


90 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


ginning of the Assyrian temple liturgy a threefold asur, 
thatis, ~ salutany, “or: holy.” 

‘‘God created man out of the dust of the earth and 
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man be- 
came a living soul,’’—thus runs the so-called Yahvistic 
account of creation (Genesis ii. 7). The very same con- 
ceptions are found among the Babylonians: man is formed 
of earth (mud, clay), as for instance Eabani is created 
out of a pinched off and moisted piece of clay (compare 
Job xxxili. 6: “I too am made of a pinch of clay, Yiwand 
for that reason he returns again thither (so Genesis iii. 
19) ; but he becomes a living being through the breath 
of God. In the opening of a letter to the Assyrian king 
the writers characterise themselves as ‘‘ dead dogs”’ (cf. 
2 Samuel ix.8), whom the king, their master, had caused 
to live by ‘‘ putting the breath of life into their nostrils.’ 

According to Babylonian notions the spittle of human 
beings possesses in a marked degree magic power. Spittle 
and spells are closely related conceptions, and spittle has 
death-dealing as well as life-giving power. ‘‘O Mar- 
duk,’’—thus runs a prayer to the patron deity of Babel, 
—O Marduk! thine is the spittle of life!’’ Who is not 
reminded by this of New Testament narratives such as 
that of Jesus taking the deaf and dumb man aside, put- 
ting his fingers in his ears, spitting and touching the 
man’s tongue with the spittle, saying, ‘‘ Hephata,’’ ‘‘ Be 
opened!’’ (Mark vii. 33 ff., and compare viii. 23, John 
beep atta) 

Yahveh conducts his people on the march through 
the desert by means of a pillar of cloud by day and a pil- 
lar of fire by night (comp. also Isaiah iv. 5); but Esar- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 91 


haddon, King of Asséria, before setting out upon a cam- 
paign, also receives the prophetic message: ‘‘I, Istar of 
Arbela, will cause to rise upon thy right hand smoke and 
upon thy left fire.’’ 

‘‘Set thine house in order,’’ says the prophet Isaiah 
to King Hezekiah when he is sick unto death, ‘‘ for thou 
art sick and wilt not live’’ (Isaiah xxxviii. 1), while the 
Assyrian general Kudurru, to whom the king has sent 
his own personal physician, thanks the king with the 
words: ‘‘I was dead, but the king, my lord, has made 


me to live.’’ 


The soul of a man sick unto death is con- 
ceived as already straying in the underworld, has already 
gone down into the pit (Psalms xxx. 4). For this reason 
the goddess Gula, the patron genius of physicians, has 
the title ‘‘Awakener of the dead’’: an Oriental physician 
who did not raise people from the dead would be no phy- 
sician at all. 

How great the similarity between all things in Babel 
and Bible! Here as well as there the fondness for ren- 
dering speech and thought vivid by symbolical actions (I 
cite here merely the scapegoat which is chased away into 
the desert) ; here as well as there the same world of con- 
stant wonders and signs, of perpetual revelations of the 
divinity, particularly through dreams, the same naive 
conceptions of the divinity! As in Babel the gods eat and 
drink and even retire to rest, so Yahveh goes walking in 
Paradise in the cool of the evening, or takes delight in 
the smell of Noah’s sacrifice. And just as in the Old 
Testament Yahveh speaks to Moses and Aaron and to all 
the prophets, so also in Babel the gods speak to men, 


92 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


either directly or through the mouth of their priests and 
divinely inspired prophets and prophetesses. 

Revelation! For a long time all scientifically trained 
theologians, whether Evangelical or Catholic, have for 
centuries been firmly convinced that it was a grievous~ 
etror to have regarded the invaluable remains of ancient 
Hebrew scriptures collected into the Old Testament as 
constituting collectively a religious canon, as being from 
beginning to end a revealed book of religion. For among 
them are writings such as the Book of Job, which ques- 
tions the very existence of a just God, and in language 
that sometimes borders on blasphemy, and other very 
profane compositions, such, for example, as wedding 
songs (the so-called Song of Solomon). In the pretty 
love-song, Ps. 45, we read, v. 11 ff.: ‘‘ Hear, O daughter, 
and consider and incline thine ear: forget also thine own 
people and thy father’s house; and if the king shall de- 
fall down before 





sire thy beauty—for he is thy lord 
aia”? 

It is very easy to imagine what the results must be 
when books and passages like these were forced to submit 
to a theological, and even a Messianic, interpretation (cf. 
the Epistle to the Hebrews i. 8 f.) ,—the result could not 
fail to be such as it was in that medizeval Catholic monk 
who, when he read in his Psalter the Latin marza, ‘‘the 
seas,’’ crossed himself as in the presence of ‘‘ Maria,”’ 
meaning Mary, the mother of Christ. But for the re- 
mainder of the Old Testament literature also the doctrine 
of verbal inspiration has been surrendered even by the 
Catholic Church. The Old Testament itself has com- 
pelled this result, with its mass of contradictory duplicate 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 93 


accounts, and with the absolutely inextricable confusion 
which has been brought about in the Pentateuch by per- 
petual revision and combination. 

And to be perfectly serious and frank,—we have not 
deserved such an immediate and personal revelation from 
the divinity anyway. For mankind has unto this day 
treated with absolute flippancy the most primitive and 
genuine revelation of the holy God, the ten command- 
ments on the tables of the law from Sinai. Dr. Martin 
Luther said: 


“¢ Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn.”’ 


(Inviolate the Word let stand !) 


and yet in the Smaller Catechism, from which our chil- 
dren are instructed, the entire second commandment has 
been suppressed, the same upon which God laid such 
especial emphasis (Exodus xx. 22 f.) : ‘‘ Thou shalt not 
make unto thyself any image or any likeness,’’ etc., and 
have put in its place the last commandment, or rather 
prohibition of covetousness (wicked desire), after having 
torn it in two, which might easily have been recognised 
as unpermissible by comparing Exodus xx. 17 and Deu- 
teronomy v. 18. 

The tommand to honor father and mother is not the 
fourth but the fifth, and so on. And in the Catholic 
Catechism, which has the same method of numbering the 
commandments, the first commandment is, indeed, fuller: 
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me; thou shalt 
not make unto thyself any graven image, to worship it,”’ 
but immediately after we read: ‘‘ Nevertheless, we make 
images of Christ, of the mother of God and of all the 


94 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


saints, because we do not worship them, but only rev- 
erence them.’’ ‘This entirely ignores the fact that God 
the Lord expressly says: ‘‘ Thou shalt not make unto 
thyself any graven image to worship and to reverence.’ 
(Consider also Deuteronomy iv. 16.) 

But if we regard the matter for a while from the 
standpoint of the letter of the Thora, this reproach falls 
still more heavily upon Moses himself, a shrill and unani- 
mous reproach from all the people of the earth who ask 
after God if haply they may find him. Justathimleyot 
it: The Almighty God, ‘‘the All-container, the All-sus- 
tainer,’’ the inscrutable, unapproachable, proclaims from 
the midst of fire and cloud and to the accompaniment of 
thunder and lightning his most holy will, Yahveh, ‘‘the 


”? with his own hands carves 


rock whose work is perfect, 
two tablets of stone and engraves upon them with his 
own fingers, those fingers that keep the world in equilib- 
rium, the Ten Commandments,—and then Moses in 
anger hurls away the eternal tables of the eternal God 
and breaks them into a thousand pieces! And this God 
a second time writes other tables, which present his last 
autograph revelation to mankind, the most unique and 
tangible revelation of God,—and Moses does not consider 
it worth while to report literally to his people, and thus 
to mankind, what God had engraved upon those tables. 

We scholars regard it as a serious reproach to one of 
our number if, in dealing with an inscription by any one 
soever, though but a shepherd who may have perpetuated 
his name upon some rock on the Sinaitic peninsula, he 
reports it inaccurately or incorrectly in even a single 


TR V., “server? 


S€é 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 95 


character ;. whereas Moses, when he impresses the ten 
commandments upon his people once more before cross- 
ing the Jordan, not only changes individual words, trans- 
poses words and sentences, but even substitutes for one 
long passage another which, however, he also emphasises 
expressly as being the very literal word of God. And 
accordingly we do not know to this day whether God 
commanded that the Sabbath day be kept holy in memory 
of his own rest after finishing the six days’ labor of crea- 
tion (Exodus xx. 11; comp. xxxi. 17), or in commem- 
oration of the incessant forced labor of his people during 
their stay in Egypt (Deuteronomy v. 14 ff.). 

The same carelessness has to be regretted in other 
points that concern God’s most sacred bequest to men. 
To this day we are hunting for the peak in the mountain- 
chain of the Sinaitic peninsula which corresponds with 
all that is told, and while we are most minutely informed 
regarding vastly less important things, such, for in- 
stance, as the rings and the rods of the box which con- 
tained the two tables, we learn absolutely nothing about 
the outward character of the tables themselves, except 
that they were written upon both sides. 

When the Philistines capture the ark of the covenant 
and place it in the temple of Dagon at Ashdad, they find 
on the second morning following the image of the god 
Dagon lying in fragments before the ark of Yahveh (1 
Samuel v. f.). And then when it is brought to the little 
Jewish border-town of Beth Shemesh and the inhabitants 
look at it, seventy of them pay for their presumption by 
death,—according to another account fifty thousand (! ) 
(1 Sam. vi. 19). Even one who touches the ark from 


96 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


inadvertence is slain by the wrath of Yahveh (2 Sam. 
6-7 {.). 

But as soon as we touch the soil of the historical 
period, history is silent. We are told in detail that the 
Chaldeans carried away the treasures of the temple at 
Jerusalem and the gold, silver, and copper furnishings of 
the temple, the fire pans and basins and shovels (2 Kings 
xxiv. 13; xxv. 13 ff.), but no one is concerned about the 
ark with the two God-given tables; the temple goes down 
in flame, but not a single word is said of the fate of the 
two miracle-working tables of the Almighty God, the 
most sacred treasure of the Old Covenant. 

We do not propose to ask the cause of all this, but 
only to record the fact that Moses is exonerated by the 
critical study of the Pentateuch from the reproach which 
belongs to him according to the strict letter of the Thora. 
For, as is confirmed by many and among them Dillmann 
(Commentary to the Books of Exodus and Levtticus, p. 
201) , this authority so highly valued even on the Catholic 
side, ‘‘ We have the ten commandments in two different 
revisions neither of which is based upon the tables them- 
selves, but upon other versions.”’ 

And similarly all the other so-called Mosaic laws 
are transmitted to us in two comparatively late revisions, 
separated from each other by centuries, whence all the 
differences are easily enough accounted for. And we 
know this also, that the so-called Mosaic laws represent 
regulations and customs part of which had been recog- 
nised in Israel from primitive times, and part of which 
had not received legal recognition until after the settle- 
ment of the people in Canaan, and were then attributed 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 97 


bodily to Moses, and later, for the sake of greater sacred- 
ness and inviolability, to Yahveh himself: The same 
process we see in connection with the laws of other races 
—I will mention here the law-book of Manu—and it is 
precisely the case with the law-making Babylon. 

In my first lecture on this subject I pointed out the 
fact that we find in Babylon as early as 2250 B.C. a 
State with a highly developed system of law, and I spoke 
of a great Code of Hammurabi which established civil 
law in all its branches. While at that time we could 
only infer the existence of this Code from scattered but 
perfectly reliable details,—the original of this great Law 
Book of Hammurabi has now been found, and therewith 
a treasure of the very first rank has been conferred upon 
science and especially upon the science of law and the 
history of civilisation. It was in the ruins of the acrop- 
olis of Susa, about the turn of the year 1901-1902, that 
the French archeologist de Morgan and the Dominican 
ymnonk Scheil had the good fortune to find a monument of 
King Hammurabi in the shape of a diorite block 2.25 
meters high. It had apparently been carried away from 
Babylon along with other plunder by the Elamites. On 
it had been engraved in the most careful manner 282 
paragraphs of law (Fig. 76). As the King himself says, 
they are ‘‘laws of justice which Hammurabi, the mighty 
and just King, has established for the use and benefit of 
the weak and oppressed, of widows and orphans.’’ ‘“‘ Let 
the wronged person,’’ thus we read, ‘‘ who has a case at 
law, read this my monumental record and hear my pre- 
cious words; my monument shall explain his case to him 
and he may look forward to its settlement! With a heart 


98 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


full of gratitude let him then say: ‘ Hammurabi is a lord 
who is like’a real father to his people.’’’ But although 


ie. 





Fig. 76. A PorRTION OF THE INSCRIPTION OF THE LAWS OF HIAMMURABI. 


the King says that he, the sun of Babylon, which sheds 
the light over North and South in his land, has written 


BABEL AND BIBLE: 99 


down these laws, nevertheless he in his turn received 
them from the highest judge of heaven and earth, the 





Fig. 77. HAMMURABI BEFORE SHAMASH, THE Gop oF Law. 


Sun god, the lord of all that is called ‘‘right,’’ and there- 
fore the mighty tablet of the law bears at its head the 


100 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


beautiful das-relief (Fig. 77), which represents Hammu- 
rabi in the act of receiving the laws from Shamash, the 
supreme law-giver. 

Thus and not otherwise was it with the giving of the 
Law on Sinai, the so-called making of the Covenant be- 
tween Yahveh and Israel. For the purely human origin 
and character of the Israelitic laws are surely evident 
enough! Or is any one so bold as to maintain that the 
thrice holy God, who with his own finger engraved upon 
the stone tablet 46 “@erzach ‘“‘thou shalt not kill,’’ in the 
same breath sanctioned blood-vengeance, which rests like 
a curse upon Oriental peoples to this day, while Hammu- 
rabi had almost obliterated the traces of it? Or is it pos- 
sible that any one still clings to the notion that circum- 
cision, which had for ages before been customary among 
the Egyptians and the Bedouin Arabs, was the mark of 
an especial covenant between God and Israel? 

We understand very well, according to Oriental 
thought and speech, that the numerous regulations for 
every possible petty event in daily life, as for instance, 
the case of a fierce ox that kills a man or another ox 
(Exodus xxi. 28 f., 35 f.), that the prohibitions of foods, 
the minute medicinal prescriptions for skin diseases, the 
detailed directions regarding the priest’s wardrobe, are 
represented as derived from Yahveh. But this is alto- 
gether outward form; the God who prefers the offerings 
of ‘‘a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart (Ps. 
li. 17), and who took no pleasure in the worship by burnt 
offerings after the fashion of the ‘‘heathen’’ peoples, cer- 
tainly did not ordain this worship by burnt offerings with 
its minute details, nor devise the recipes for ointment 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 10] 


and burnt incense ‘‘after the art of the perfumer,”’ as the 
expression runs (Exodus xxx. 25, 35). 

It will be the business of future investigators to de- 
termine to just what extent the Israelitic laws both civil 
and levitical are specifically Israelitic, or general Semitic, 
or how far they were influenced by the Babylonian code 
which is so much older and which had certainly extended 
beyond the borders of Babylon. I think, for instance, of 
the law of retribution, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a 
tooth, of the feast of the new moon, the so-called ‘‘ shew 
bread,’’ the high priest’s breast plate, and many other 
things. For the present we must be thankful that the 
institution of the Sabbath day, the origin of which was 
unclear even to the Hebrews themselves, is now recog- 
nised as having its roots in the Babylonian Sada/du, 
“the day par excellence.”’ 

On the other hand, no one has maintained that the 
Ten Commandments were borrowed even in part from 
Babylon, but on the contrary it has been pointed out 
very emphatically that prohibitions like the Fifth, Sixth, 
and Seventh spring from the instinct of self-preservation 
which is common to all men. In fact, the most of the 
Ten Commandments are just as sacred to the Babylo- 
nians as to the Hebrews: disrespect for parents, false 
witness, and every sort of covetousness are also punished 
severely in Babylonian law, generally with death. Thus, 
for instance, we read in the very third paragraph of Ham- 
murabi’s code: ‘‘If in a law suit any one on the witness- 
stand utters falsehoods and cannot support his testimony, 
he shall himself be punished with death if the life of an- 


other is involved.’’ 


102 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


The Second Commandment is specifically Israelitic, 
the prohibition of every sort of image-worship, which in 
its direct application seems to have a distinctly antt- 
Babylonian point. 

But in connection with the eminently Israelitic First 
Commandment, ‘‘I am Yahveh, thy God; thou shalt 
have no other gods beside me,’’ may I be permitted to 
treat more fully one point which deeply and permanently 
concerns all who are interested in Babel and Bible,—the 
monotheism of the Old Testament. From the standpoint 
of Old Testament theology I can understand how, after 
it has unanimously and rightly given up the verbal in- 
spiration of the ancient Hebrew scriptures and thus rec- 
ognised, perhaps unintentionally but quite logically, the 
wholly unauthoritative character of the Old Testament 
writings as such for our belief, our knowledge and our 
investigations,—I say I can understand how theology 
now claims as divine the spirit that pervades them and 
preaches with so much the greater unanimity the “‘ ethi- 
cal monotheism of Israel,’’ the ‘‘ spirit of prophecy ’’ as 
‘C4 real revelation of the living God.”’ 

Great consternation seems to have been produced by 
the names mentioned in my first lecture, which we find 
in surprisingly great numbers among the North-Semitic 
nomads who immigrated into Babylon about 2500 B. C.: 
‘CH (i. e., God) hath giveny” “God sits in conmtrolh 
“*Tf God were not my God,’’ ‘‘ God, consider me,’’ “‘ God 
is God,” ‘‘Jahu (i. e.g;Wahveh) is God.’ IT sealiyaiets 
not understand this uneasiness. For since the Old Testa- 
ment itself represents Abram as preaching in the name 
of Yahveh (Gen. xii. 8), and since Yahveh had already 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 103 


been the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, those old 
names such as Jahu-ilu, i. e., Joel, ought really to be 
welcomed with joy. And these names should prove very 
opportune, particularly for those theologians who regard 
themselves as affirmative and who hold that ‘‘all divine 
inspiration has undergone a gradual historical develop- 
ment,’’ thereby turning the orthodox notion of inspira- 
tion upside down, as it seems to me. 

However, the great majority of theologians feel and 
fear rightly that these names, which are more than a 
thousand years older than the corresponding names in 
the Old Testament, which attest the worship of a single 
god named Jahu, ‘‘the permanent’’ (whether a tribal 
god or what not), and which moreover might indicate the 
initial point of an historical development of the belief in 
Yahveh as existing in very much wider circles than 
merely among the descendants of Abram, will thereby 
throw serious doubt upon its claim to be a special revela- 
tion. And therefore they are laboring and tormenting 
themselves in the effort to explain away these names, 
hesitating at no means. But though the waves spew and 
foam, like a lighthouse in the dark night stand fast the 
names of the descendants of North Semitic Bedouins from 
2300.3. C., “* Godeis God,’ “* Jahu is God.”’ 

It seems to me that exaggerations should be avoided 
in either direction. I have never ceased to emphasise 
the gross polytheism of the Babylonians, and am far 
from feeling obliged to disguise it. But I regard it as 
just as much out of place to make the Sumerian-Babylo- 
nian pantheon and its representation in poetry, particu- 


larly in popular poetry, the butt of shallow wit and sar- 


104 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


castic exaggerations, as we should properly condemn 
such ridicule if directed at the gods of Homer. Nor 
should the worship of divinities in images of wood or 
stone be in any wise glossed over. Only it should not 
be forgotten that even the Biblical account of creation 
has man created ‘‘in the 
likeness of God,’’ in dia- 
metrical contradiction of 
the constantly emphasised 
‘spirituality’? of God,— 
as has rightly been pointed 
out by students of theology. 
And in view of this fact we 
can understand after all how 
the Babylonians reversed 
this method and conceived 
and represented their gods 
in the image of man. 

The prophets of the Old 
Testament do exactly the 









AS SAS SSS 


same thing, at least in spirit. 
In perfect agreement with 
the Babylonians and Assy- 
5) 9) 99) oe rians the prophet Habakkuk 
. Horns THE EMBLEM OF (chap. iii.) sees Yahveh ap- 

cas proach with horses and char- 
iot, bow and arrows and lance, and even with ‘‘horns at 
his side,’’* with horns, the symbol of authority and 
strength and victory (cp. Numbers xxiii. 22), the cus- 
tomary adornment of the headdress of both higher and 


TR. V., ‘‘rays coming forth from his hand.” 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 105 


lower divinities among the Assyrio-Babylonians (Fig. 
78). And the representations of God the Father in 
Christian art: in Michael Angelo, Raphael, and all our 
illustrated Bibles,;—the representation of the first day of 


\ ' i 


Sah 
\ ih a 


ZS 








Fig. 79. THE ANCIENT OF Days. (After Schnorr von Karolsfeld.) 


ereation (Fig. 79) is taken from Julius von Schnorr’s 
illustrated Bible,—are all derived from a vision of the 
Prophet Daniel (vii. 9) who sees God as the ‘‘ Ancient of 
Days, his garments white as snow and the hair of his 
head like unto pure wool.”’ 


106 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


But the Babylonians can endure with the same equa- 
nimity as the Catholic Church the wearisome ridicule of 
the Old Testament prophets cast upon the Babylonian 
idols who have eyes but see not, ears but hear not, a nose 
but smell not, and feet but cannot go. For just as intel- 
ligent Catholics see in the images merely the representa- 
tions of Christ, Mary, and the saints, so did the intelli- 
gent Babylonians: no hymn or prayer was addressed to 
the image as such,—they are always appealing to the 
divinity that dwelis beyond the bounds of earth. 

In passing judgment upon the ‘‘ethical monothe- 


” of Israel also a certain moderation would seem to 


ism 
be desirable. In the first place, we must except from 
consideration in this connection much of the pre-exilic 
period, during which Judah as well as Israel, kings as 
well as people, were dominated by an ineradicable yet 
quite natural predilection for the indigenous Canaanitish 
polytheism. 

Furthermore, it seems to me a particularly unwise 
proceeding on the part of certain hotspurs to portray the 
ethical level of Israel, even that of the pre-exilic period, 
as elevated far above that of the Babylonians. It is un- 
deniable that the warfare of the Assyrio-Babylonians was 
cruel and sometimes barbarous. But so was the conquest 
of Canaan by the Hebrew tribes accompanied by a tor- 
rent of innocent blood; the capture of ‘‘the great and 
goodly alien cities, of the houses full of all good things, 
of the cisterns, the vineyards, the olive-groves’’ (Deuter- 
onomy vi. 10 f.) was preceded by the ‘‘ devoting’? (Deu- 
teronomy vil. 2, R. V., margin) of hundreds of villages 


on both sides of the Jordan, that is, by the merciless 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 107 


massacre of all the inhabitants, even of the women and 
the very smallest of children. And as for right and jus- 
tice in state and people, the persistent denunciations by 
the prophets of both Israel and Judah of the oppression 
of the poor, of widows and of orphans, taken in conjunc- 
tion with stories such as that of Naboth’s vineyard (1 
Kings xxi), reveal a profound corruption of both kings 
and people, while the almost two thousand years’ exist- 
ence of the nation of Hammurabi would seem to justify 
the application to it of the saying: ‘‘ Righteousness ex- 
alteth a nation.”’ 

We actually possess a monumental tablet which 
warns the Babylonian king himself most insistently 
against every species of injustice! ‘‘If the king takes 
the money of the people of Babylon to appropriate it to 
his own treasury, and then hears the suit of the Babylo- 
nians and permits himself to be inclined to partisanship, 
then Marduk, the Lord of heaven and earth, will set his 
enemy against him and give his possessions and his 
treasure to his enemy.”’ 

In the matter of love of one’s neighbor, of compas- 
sion upon one’s neighbor, as has already been remarked, 
there is no deep gulf to be discovered between Babylon 
and the Old Testament. 

In passing let me call attention here to one other 
point. Old Testament theologians make very merry 
over the Babylonian account of the Flood with its poly- 
theism, and yet it contains one element which appeals to 
us much more humanely than that of the Bible. ‘‘ The 
Deluge,’’ thus Xisuthros tells us, “‘was over. I looked 


forth over the wide ocean, lamenting aloud because all 


108 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


humankind had perished.’? Eduard Siiss, the celebrated 
Austrian geologist, confessed long since that in touches 
like this ‘‘the simple narrative of Xisuthros bears the 
stamp of convincing truth.’’? We find no report of any 
compassion on the part of Noah. 

The Babylonian Noah and his wife are transformed 
into gods; this too would have been impossible in Israel. 
Of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to the Feast of Weeks we 
read, Deuteronomy xvi. 11 (comp. also xii. 18): ‘* And 
thou shalt rejoice before Yahveh, thy God, thou and thy 
son and thy daughter and thy manservant and thy maid- 
servant,’’—but where is the wife? It is generally recog- 
nised that the position of women in Israel was a very 
subordinate one from earliest childhood. We find in the 
Old Testament scarcely a single girl’s name which ex- 
presses in the cordial manner customary in the case of 
boy’s names, joyful gratitude to Yahveh for the birth of 
the child. All the tender pet-names of girls, such as 
‘¢Beloved,’’? ‘‘Fragrant One,’’ ‘‘ Dew-born,” CBee? 
“(Gazelle,’’? ‘‘Ewe’’ (Rachel), ‘‘ Myrtle’? and ™ Palm, 
‘¢Coral’’ and ‘‘Crown’’ cannot in my opinion deceive us 
on this point. The woman is the property of her parents 
and afterwards of her husband; she isa valuable ‘‘ hand ”’ 
upon which in marriage a great share of the heaviest do- 
mestic burdens are laid. And above all, as in Islam, she 
is disqualified for performing religious rites. 

All this was different and better in Babylon: for in- 
stance, we read in the time of Hammurabi of women who 
have their chairs carried into the temple; we find the 
names of women as witnesses in legal documents, and 


other similar things. Right here in this matter of the 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 109 


position of women we may perceive clearly how pro- 
foundly the Babylonian civilisation was influenced by the 
non-Semitic civilisation of the Sumerians. 

And how variously pitched is that instrument, the 
human temperament! While Koldewey and others with 
him are astonished anew that the excavations in Babylo- 
nia bring to light absolutely no obscene figures, a Catho- 
lic Old Testament scholar knows of ‘‘numberless statu- 
ettes found in Babylon which have no other purpose but 





Fig. 80. BABYLONIAN CLay FiGurES REPRESENTING THE GODDESS OF BIRTH. 


to give expression to the lowest and most vulgar sensual- 
ity.’ Thou poor goddess of childbirth, poor goddess Is- 
tar! However, although thou be moulded only of clay, 
yet needst thou not blush to appear in this company 
(Fig. 80); for I am certain thou wilt give no offence, 
just as certain as that we are none of us offended but on 
the contrary love to give ourselves up to the contempla- 
tion of the glorious and familiar marble statue of Eve 
with her children (Fig. 81). 


LO BABEL AND BIBLE. 


And although an Evangelical specialist in the Old 
Testament, finding occasion in a passage of a Babylonian 
poem, which has not yet received its definitive interpre- 
tation, exclaims with similar ethical indignation, that we 
‘‘must needs search through the most vulgar corners of 
Further Asia in order to find its analogues,’’ I cannot, 
indeed, boast of equal knowledge of local details, but I 
would like to remind him of 
the reasons why our school 
authorities so urgently de- 
manded extracts from the Old 
Testament, and to warn him 
against throwing stones, lest 
all too speedily his own glass- 
house come crashing about his 
ears. 

However, these skirmishes, 
provoked by my opponents, 
into the realm of the moral 
level of the two nations in- 


volved, seem to me of infinitely 





less importance than a final ob- 
Fig. 81. Evz AND HER CHILDREN. 


(A marble statue by Adolf Briitt.) 


servation in connection with 


the proclamation of the ‘‘eth- 


) ¢ 


ical monotheism’’ of Israel or of the ‘‘ spirit of prophet- 


ism’? as ‘‘a genuine revelation of the living God,”’ 
which in my opinion has not yet received fitting atten- 
tion. 

Five times a day and even more frequently the ortho- 
dox Moslem prays the Paternoster of Islam, the first Sura 


of the Koran, which closes with the words: ‘‘ Lead us, O 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 111 


Allah, the right way, the way of those whom thou hast 
favored, who are not smitten by thy wrath [like the Jews] 
and who are not in error [like the Christians].’’ ‘The 
Moslem alone is the one favored by Allah, he alone is the 
one chosen by God to adore and worship the true God. 
All other men and races are kafirun, heretics, whom God 
has not predestined to eternal salvation. Just such and 
not otherwise, deeply rooted in the nature of the Semite, 
does the Yahvism of Israel show itself to be, in the pre- 
exilic as well as in the post-exilic period. Yahveh is the 
only true (or highest) God, but at the same time he is 
the God of Israel solely and exclusively, Israel is his 
chosen people and his inheritance; all other nations are 
Gojzm or heathen, given over by Yahveh himself to god- 
lessness and idolatry. This is a doctrine absolutely ir- 
reconcilable with our nobler conception of God, but which, 
nevertheless, is uttered in uncloaked language in the 
nineteenth verse of the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy, a 
passage which at the same time destroys with a single 
phrase the illusion of a ‘‘ primitive revelation’’: ‘‘ Lest 
thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven and when thou seest 
the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of 
heaven, thou worship them and reverence them, which 
Yahveh, thy God, hath divided unto all the peoples under 
the whole heaven; but you Yahveh hath taken and 
brought forth out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of 
inheritance.’? According to this, the worship of the 
heavenly bodies and of idols was willed and decreed by 
Yahveh himself upon the peoples under the whole heaven. 
So much the more dreadful is the shock when in Deute- 


ronomy vii. 2, Yahveh gives the command to exterminate 


iby BABEL AND BIBLE. 


mercilessly on account of their impiety the seven great 
and powerful peoples whom Israel may expect to find 
already in possession of Canaan, or when we read, verse 
16: ‘‘And thou shalt consume all the peoples which Yah- 
veh thy God shall deliver unto thee; thine eye shall not 
pity them.’’ 

It goes hard to regard as inspired by the holy and 
just God this monotheism of the exclusively national 
type. It is not manifested in the nature of the case in 
such passages as the account of the creation, but in gene- 
ral it runs throughout the Old Testament undeniably 
from Sinai on: ‘‘I am Yahveh, thy God,’’ to Deutero- 


” and to 


Isaiah: ‘‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, 
Zechariah’s prophecy (xx. 8, 23): ‘‘ Thus saith Yahveh 
Zebaoth: In those days it shall come to pass that ten 
men shall take hold, out of all the languages of the na- 
tions (Gojzm), shall even take hold of the skirt of him 
that is a Jew, saying: ‘We will go with you, for we 
have heard that God is with you.’’’ It is this monotheism 
that left all the other nations of the earth ‘‘ without hope’’ 
and ‘‘ without God in the world,’’ as for instance the 
Apostle Paul assumes (Ephesians ii. 11 f.). And yet 
we have all been so hypnotised from youth up by this 
dogma of the ‘‘exclusive inheritance of Israel’? (Ephe- 
sians ii. 12), that we regard the history of the ancient 
world from an entirely wrong point of view and are even 
satisfied to claim for ourselves at this day the réle ofa 
‘‘ spiritual Israel,’’ forgetting the mighty historical revo- 
lution which was accomplished in the New Testament 
times under the influence of John the Baptist and the 
preaching of Jesus, that dramatic conflict between Juda- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 113 


ism, Jewish Christianity, and Gentile Christianity, which 
made it possible for Peter to exclaim (Acts x. 34 f.): 
‘Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of per- 
sons, but that in every nation, he that feareth him and is 
acceptable to him,’’ thus tearing down the partition be- 
tween the Oriental-Israelitic and the Christian- philosophic 
conception of the universe. 

For my own part, I live firm in the belief that the 
early Hebrew scriptures, even if they lose their standing 


as ‘‘revealed’’ or as permeated by a ‘‘revealed”’ 


spirit, 
will nevertheless always maintain their great importance, 
especially as a unique monument of a great religio-histo- 
rical process which continues even into our own times. 
The lofty passages in the prophets and the psalms, filled 
with a living confidence in God and with longing for re- 
pose in God, will. always find a living echo in our hearts, 
despite the particularistic limitation of its literal text and 
its literal meaning, which are largely obliterated anyway 
in our translation of the Bible. Indeed, words like those 
of the prophet Micah (vi. 6-8): ‘‘Wherewith shall I 
come before Yahveh, and bow myself before the high 
God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with 
calves of a year old? Will Yahveh be pleased with thou- 
sands of rams, or ten thousands of rivers of 011? Or shall 
I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my 
body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, O 
man, what is good; and what doth Yahveh require of 
thee, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk 
humbly with thy God! ’’—words like these, insisting on 
an ethical manifestation of religion in the life (and which 


are also found in Babylonian writings) , come, as it were, 


114 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


from the very soul of all sincerely religious people to- 
day. 

But on the other hand, let us not blindly cling to 
antiquated and scientifically discredited dogmas from the 
vain fear that our faith in God and our true religious life 
might suffer harm! Let us remember that all things 
earthly are in living motion and that standing still means 
death. Let us look back upon the mighty, throbbing 
force with which the German Reformation filled the great 
nations of the earth in every field of human endeavor and 
human progress! But even the Reformation is only one 
stage on the road to the goal of truth set for us by God 
and in God. Let us press forward toward it, humbly but 
with all the resources of free scientific investigation, joy- 
fully professing our adherence to that standard perceived 
with eagle eye from the high watch-tower and courage- 
ously proclaimed to all the world: ‘‘ The further develop- 
ment of religion.’’ 


THE STRUGGLE FOR BABEL 
AND BIBLE 





a’ 


i 


LITERATURE ON BABEL AND BIBLE. 


J. Bartu, Babel und israelitisches Religionswesen. A Lecture. Ber- 
Ling .59Q02; 36 pp. 


Pror. Dr. Karu Buppe, Das Alte Testament und die Ausgrabungen. 
Giesen, 1903. (A Lecture, delivered May 29, 1902, at the 
Theological Conference at Giessen); 39 pp., of which, how- 
ever, only pp. I-10 are pertinent. 


Dr. JoHANNES DO6LLER, Imperial and Royal Court Chaplain and 
Director of Studies at the Frintaneum, Vienna, Abel und 
Babel oder Babel und Bibel? Eine Entgegniung auf Prof. F. 
Delitesch’s ‘‘Babel und Bibel.” Padernborn, 1903. 


Pror. Dr. HomME.L, Die altortentalischen Denkmdler und das Alte 
Testament. Eine Erwiderung auf Prof. Fr. Delitsscl’s “Babel 
und Bibel.” Berlin, 1902; 38 pp. 


Dr. ALFRED JEREMIAS, pastor of the Lutheran Church at Leipzig, 
Im Kampfe um Babel und Bibel. Ein Wort zur Verstandigung 
und Abwehr. Leipzig, 1903; 35 pp- 


Pror. D. R. Kirre., Die babylonischen Ausgrabungen und die biblische 
Urgeschichte. Leipzig, 1902; 36 pp. See also under Sec- 
tion Il., p. Oz. 


W. Kniescuke, pastor at Sieversdorf, Bibel und Babel, El und Bel. 
Eine Replik auf Friedrich Deliteschs’s Babel und Bibel. West- 
end-Berlin, 1902; 64 pp. 


Dr. Epuarp Konic, Prof. of theology. Brbed und Babel. Eine 
hulturgeschichtliche Skizze. Sixth, enlarged edition, with ref- 
erence to the most recent literature on the subject of Babel 
and Bible. Berlin, 1902; 60 pp. 


118 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Pror. D. Sam. Oettii, Der Kampf um Bibel und Babel. Ein reli- 
gtonsgeschichtlicher Vortrag. Second edition. Leipzig, 1902; 
32 PP: 

Rass. Dr. Lupw. A. Rosentuat, Babel und Bibel oder Babel gegen 
Bibel? Ein Wort sur Klérung. Berlin, 1902; 31 pp. 


Pror. Bruno BaENTSCH, Jena, ‘Babel und Bibel. Eine Prifung 
des unter diesem Titel erschienenen Vortrages von Friedrich 
Delitzsch, besonders auf die darin enthaltenen religions- 
geschichtlichen Ausfiihrungen,” in the Protestantische Monats- 
hefte, edited by D. Julius Websky. Vol. VI., No. 8 (August 
15, 1902). Berlin, 1902. Cf. also two articles, signed B. B., 
‘««Noch einmal Babel und Bibel,” in the Zhdringer Runa- 
schau, March 2nd and gth, 1go2. 


Pror. Dr. C. H. Corniti, Breslau, Deutsche Litteraturzettung, 
1902, No. 27 (July 5). 


Heinrich Dannett (Schénebeck a. E.), ‘Babel und Bibel,” 
Magdeburgische Zeitung, No. 25, 1902, Beiblatt. 


PRIVATDOCENT Dr. W. ENGELKEMPER, Miinster, ‘‘ Babel und Bibel,” 
Wissenschaftliche Beilage zur Germania, 1902, Nos. 31 (July 
31) and 32 (August 7). Berlin, 1902. 


Pror. D. GunxKEL, ‘‘Babylonische und biblische Urgeschichte.” 
Christliche Welt, XVII., 1903, No. 6 (Feb. 5), cols. 121- 
134. 

Pror. Dr. PETER JENSEN, ‘‘ Babel und Bibel,” Dve christliche Weld, 
XVI., 1902, No. 21 (May 22), cols. 487-494. 


Franz Kauten, Bonn, ‘‘Babel und Bibel,” Literarischer Hand- 
wetser sunichst fiir alle Katholiken deutscher Zunge. XL., 
Nos. 766 and 767, 1g01—1902. 


P. Keit, London, ‘‘Babel und Bibel.” Pastor bonus. Zeitschrift 
fir kirchliche Wissenschaft und Praxis, edited by Domkapitular 
Dr. P. Einig. XV., parts Ige2, 3 (Oct. 1, Nov: ‘aie 
1902). 

Pror. D. R. Kirret, Leipzig, ‘‘Jahve in Babel und Bibel,” Zheo- 
logisches Literaturblatt, XXIII., No. 17 (April 25, 1902). 
Also, ‘*Noch einmal Jahve in Babel und Bibel,” zdzd., No. 
18 (May 2, 1902), and ‘‘Der Monotheismus in Babel und 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 119 


Bibel,” Allgemeine evangelisch-lutherische Kirchenzeitung, 1902, 
No. 17 (April 25, 1902). 


Rasst Dr. S. Meyer, Regensburg, ‘‘Die Hypothesenglaubigen,” 
Deutsche israelitische Zeitung, X1X., No. 8 (20th February, 
1g02); and ‘*Nochmals Babel und Bibel,” zbi¢., No. 10 
(6th March). 


.‘*Babel und Bibel,” Meue preussische (Kreus-) Zeitung, 1902, No. 
211 (7th May). Signed ——1 [Lic. theol. Prof. Riedel, 
Greifswald]. 


Wot rr, ‘‘ Babel und Bibel,” Huvangelische Kirchenzeitung, 1902, No. 
28 (cols. 657-662). 


OPINIONS ON ““BABEL AND BIBWEe 


EMPEROR WILLIAM ON ‘BABEL AND BIBLE.” 


(A Letter from His Majesty Emperor William II to Admiral Hollman, President 
of the Oriental Society.) 


February 15, 1903. 
My Dear Hollman: 


My telegram to you will unquestionably have removed the 
doubts which you still entertained regarding the concluding pas- 
sage of the lecture, which was clearly understood by the audience 
and therefore could not be altered. I am glad, nevertheless, that 
the subject-matter of the second lecture has again been taken up, 
and I gladly seize the opportunity after a perusal of a copy of the 
proofs to state again clearly my position with regard to it. 

During an evening’s entertainment with us Professor Delitzsch 
had the opportunity to fully confer and debate with Her Majesty, 
the Empress, and Dr. Dryander, while I listened and remained 
passive. Unfortunately he abandoned the standpoints of the strict 
historian and Assyriologist, going into religious and theological 
conclusions which were quite nebulous or bold. 

When he came to speak of the New Testament, it became 
clear at once that he developed such quite divergent views regard- 
ing the person of our Saviour that I had to express the diametri- 
‘cally opposite view. He does not recognise the divinity of Christ 
as a deduction therefrom and asserts that the Old Testament con- 
tains no revelation about him as the Messiah. 

Here the Assyriologist and the historical investigator ceases 
and the theologian begins, with all his light and shadow sides. In 
this province I can only urgently advise him to proceed cautiously, 
step by step, and at any rate to ventilate his theses only in the 
theological books and in the circle of his colleagues. Spare us, 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 121 


the laymen, and, above all, the Oriental Society, from hearing of 
them. 

We carry on excavations and publish the results in behalf of 
science and history, but not to conform or attack religious hypoth- 
eses. 

Professor Delitzsch, the theologian, has run away with Profes- 
sor Delitzsch, the historian; his history is exploited merely for the 
benefit of his theology. 

I regret that Professor Delitzsch did not adhere to his original 
program which he developed last year; viz., to determine, on the 
basis of the discoveries of our society and by means of critically 
verified translations of the inscriptions, the extent to which these 
materials shed light on the history of the people of Israel or eluci- 
date the historical events, customs and habits, traditions, politics 
and laws of the Israelites. In other words, he should have shown 
the mutual relationship in which the undeniably powerful and 
highly developed civilisation of the Babylonians stood to that of 
the Israelites, and the extent to which the former might have in- 
fluenced the latter or have impressed upon it its own stamp. He 
could thus have saved, so to speak, from a purely human point of 
view, the honor and good name of the Babylonian people which 
has certainly been depicted in the Old Testament in a revolting 
and grossly one-sided manner. This was indeed his original inten- 
tion,—at least as I conceive it,—and certainly his is a most fruit- 
ful and interesting field, the investigation, elucidation, and expla- 
nation of which necessarily interests us laymen in the highest 
degree and would have placed us under the highest obligation to 
him. At precisely here is the place where he should have stopped 
but beyond which unfortunately his ardent zeal led him. As was 
not otherwise to be expected, the excavations brought information 
to light which has a bearing also on the religion of the Old Testa- 
ment. He should have mentioned this fact and should have em- 
phasised and explained whatever coincidences occurred; but all 
purely religious conclusions it was his duty to have left for his hear- 
ers themselves todraw. Thus the interest and the favor of the lay 
public would have been gained in the fullest measure for his lec- 
ture. 

He approached the question of revelation in a polemical tone, 
more or less denying it or reducing it to a matter of purely human 
development. That was a grave error, for thereby he touched on 
the innermost, holiest possession of many of his hearers. 


22 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


And whether he did so justifiably or unjustifiably,—and that is 
for our present purpose quite indifferent, since we are concerned 
here not with scientific conventions of theologians but with lay 
people of all ages and professions,—he still either demolished or 
endangered the dearest conceptions, or it may be, the illusions of 
many of his hearers,—conceptions with which these people had in- 
terwoven their oldest and dearest associations. And ungestionably 
he shattered or at least undermined for these people their faith. It 
is a deed that only the greatest genius should venture to attempt 
and for which the mere study of Assyriology did not justify him. 

Goethe also once discussed this question, calling emphatic at- 
tention to the fact that one must be on one’s guard in speaking to 
the general public not to destroy even such insignificant structures 
as mere ‘‘pagodas of terminology.” The fundamental principle, 
that it is very important to distinguish precisely between what is 
and what is not adapted to the place, the public, etc., appears to 
have escaped the excellent Professor in his zeal. As a professional 
theologian it is permissible for him to publish in technical reviews 
and for his colleagues theses, hypotheses, and theories, nay, even 
convictions which it would not be proper for him to utter in a pub- 
lic lecture or book. 

I should now like to advert again to my personal attitude 
toward the doctrine of revelation and to state it in terms similar to 
those I have formerly employed toward you, my dear Hollman, 
and toward other gentlemen. 

I distinguish between two different kinds of revelation,—one 
progressive, and, as it were, historical; the other purely religious, 
as preparing the way for the future Messiah. 

Regarding the former, it must be said for me, it does not ad- 
mit of a doubt, not even the slightest, that God reveals himself 
continuously in the race of man created by him. He breathed into 
man the breath of his life and follows with fatherly love and inter- 
est the development of the human race. In order to lead it for- 
ward and develop it, he reveals himself in this or that great sage, 
whether priest or king, whether among the heathen, the Jews, or 
the Christians. Hammurabi was one. So was Moses, Abraham, 
Homer, Charlemagne, Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kant, and 
Emperor William the Great. These he sought out and endowed 
with his grace to accomplish splendid, imperishable results for 
their people, in their intellectual and physical provinces, according 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 123 


to his will. How often my grandfather pointed out that he was 
only an instrument in the Lord’s hands. 

The achievements of the great intellects of the world were do- 
nated by God to the nations in order that they might through their 
aid make further progress, and might feel their way farther and 
farther through the labyrinths which yet remained uninvestigated. 
Unquestionably God did ‘‘reveal” himself differently to the differ- 
ent races according to their position and rank in the scale of civil- 
isation, and he does the same to-day. For just as we may be over- 
whelmed by the grandeur, magnificence, and might of nature when 
we look upon it and wonder while so doing at the grandeur of God 
who is revealed in it, so assuredly are we justified, when we con- 
template the grand and splendid deeds that a man or a nation has 
accomplished, in wondering with gratitude at the splendor of the 
revelation made by Godin them. He works directly upon us and 
among us. 

The second form of revelation, the more religious, is that which 
leads to the manifestation of our Lord. It was introduced with 
Abraham, slow but forward looking and omniscient, for humanity 
was lost without it. Now begins the most astonishing activity of 
God’s revelation. Abraham’s race and the peoples developing from 
it regard faith in one God as their holiest possession, and, it fol- 
lows, hold fast to it with ironlike consistency. It is their duty to 
foster and cherish it. Split up during their Egyptian captivity, 
the divided elements were again welded together by Moses, ever 
trying to hold fast to their monotheism. It was the direct inter- 
vention of God that caused the rejuvenation of this people, thus 
proved through centuries, till the Messiah, heralded by prophets 
and psalmists, finally appeared, the greatest revelation of God in 
the world, for he appeared in the son himself. Christ is God, God 
in human form. He redeemed us and inspires, entices us to follow 
him. We feel his fire burning in us. His sympathy strengthens 
us. His discontent destroys us. But also his intercession saves 
us. Conscious of victory, building solely upon his world, we go 
through labor, ridicule, sorrow, misery, and death, for we have in 
him God’s revealed word, and he never lies. 

That is my view of these matters. 

For us of the Evangelical Denomination the Word has, through 
Luther, been made our all, and as a good theologian Delitzsch 
should not have forgotten that our great Luther taught us to sing 
and believe ° 


124 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


‘*Tnviolate the Word let stand.” 


It is to me self-evident that the Old Testament contains many 
sections which are of a purely human and historical nature, and are 
not God’s revealed word. These are merely historical descriptions 
of incidents of all kinds which happen in the political, religious, 
moral, and intellectual life of this people. 

The legislative act on Sinai, for example, can be only regarded 
as symbolically inspired by God. When Moses had to reburnish 
well known paragraphs of the law, perhaps derived from the code 
of Hammurabi, in order to incorporate and bind them into the 
loose, weak fabric of his people, here the historian can perhaps 
construe from the sense or wording a connection with the laws of 
Hammurabi, the friend of Abraham. That is perhaps logically 
correct. But that will never disguise the fact that God incited 
Moses thereto and in so far revealed himself to the people of Israel. 

Accordingly it is my opinion, that henceforward in his lectures 
before our society it will be better for our good Professor to let 
matters of religion alone. On the other hand, he may depict un- 
disturbed the relation which the religion, customs, etc. of the Baby- 
lonians bear to those of the Old Testament. 

For me the following conclusions result from the foregoing 
discussions. 

1. I believe in the one and only God. 

2. We human beings need a form in order to teach his exist- 
ence, especially for our children. 

3. This has hitherto been the Old Testament. The present 
version of this will be possibly and substantially modified under the 
influence of research through inscriptions and excavations. That 
does not matter. Neither does it matter that much of the nimbus 
of the chosen people will thereby disappear. The kernel of the 
contents of the Old Testament will remain always the same,—God 
and his works. 

Religion has never been the result of science, but the pouring 
out of the heart and being of man from intercourse with God. 

With cordial thanks and greetings, 


Your Faithful Friend, 
WILHELY, I. R. 


P. S.—You may make the utmost use of these lines. Let all 
who are interested read. 


Sal 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 12 


PROFESSOR HARNACK ON THE EMPEROR'S ATTITUDE TOWARD 
“BABEL AND BIBLE.” 


The Emperor has spoken, in order to express his position 
without ambiguity in an historico-theological dispute. This is 
something new, but in view of all the circumstances the Emperor’s 
decision is quite easily explained. The opinion was likely to be- 
come widespread, had indeed become widespread, that the Em- 
peror occupied the same theological standpoint as Dr. Delitzsch. 
Not wishing to permit this misunderstanding to continue, the Em- 
peror wrote as the public has read. 

From the point of view of scholars there was, indeed, no real 
controversy. It has long been known that a portion of the myths 
and legends of the Old Testament, together with important ele- 
ments of ancient Israelitish civilisation, had their origin in Baby- 
lon. It was equally beyond question that this fact is fatal to the 
current notion of the inspiration of the Old Testament. For the 
refutation of this belief there was no need of reference to Babylon: 
a hundred other observed facts had contributed to destroy it. 

But the knowledge of these facts had not become common 
property. However, the theologians cannot be held to blame for 
this. They had done their duty toward spreading the information 
in books and pamphlets and lectures. Our German literature points 
with pride to a work of such eminence as Wellhausen’s story of 
Israel; it appeals to all educated people and is classic in form and 
content. And beside it stand a half dozen other excellent works, 
each of which gives full and accessible information regarding Old 
Testament literature and history. But Church and School have 
been in league to suppress this knowledge by excluding it from 
their domain. And indeed they are not alone to blame. Indolence 
and fear have done their share. 

To Delitzsch’s lectures is due the credit for the fact that we 
now hear preached from the house-tops what before was but like a 
voice in the wilderness. ‘‘Credit,” indeed, is scarcely the word ; 
it is due to the force of circumstances. But we do not need to 
weigh the individual credit for the result; we hail with gratitude 
the fact that Delitzsch has given wide currency to a more correct 
view of the Old Testament. 

But has he in fact done this? Unquestionably he has removed 
a great error: the belief that the materials of the Old Testament 


126 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


are all original. But how little does the material amount to in the 
history of religion and of the spirit! If to-day some one should go 
before the public and announce to it: ‘*Gentlemen, I come to re- 
relieve you from a great error; you have hitherto believed that 
Goethe’s aust was an original work, while in fact it is only a recent 
secondary product; for the entire material of it is found in a popu- 
lar legend of the sixteenth century,”—what would be the reply to 
him? He would be laughed to scorn, and Delitzsch would join in 
the laugh. 

Without doubt he is very far from trying to determine the 
value of the Old Testament religion on the ground of its depend- 
ence upon Babylon, but in my opinion he has not done enough to 
prevent the establishment of a false conception of the matter in his 
hearers and readers. This public is very far from conceding to the 
prophets and the psalmists what it concedes without hesitation to 
a Goethe. Furthermore, for the very reason that there has pre- 
vailed hitherto a notion of the supernatural character of the Old 
Testament, the pendulum of opinion, following a familiar psycho- 
logical law, now swings to the opposite extreme. To-day it is the 
talk of the streets that ‘‘the Old Testament no longer amounts to 
much.” 

At this point the Emperor enters the arena with his letter. 
But meantime the chasm had become deeper. As the result of an 
interview the monarch had become convinced that Professor De- 
litzsch did not hold the orthodox belief regarding the divinity of 
Christ, and that the examination of the Old Testament among other 
reasons prevented his holding this belief. In the face of this nega- 
tive conviction the Emperor wished to leave no doubt regarding 
his own positive conviction. 

We must thank him for the way in which he did this. It is 
true, the reproof which Delitzsch has received cannot fail to be 
painful to him, and he must feel deeply his being excluded from 
the domain of theology upon which the Emperor himself now en- 
ters. But that was surely not the intention: the Emperor means 
to say, and he is right in so saying, that Delitzsch’s authority as an 
Assyriologist does not also extend to his theological doctrines. Be- 
yond this he concedes absolute freedom to the convictions of the 
scholar. 

Absolute freedom,—this sentiment shines forth from the Em- 
peror’s utterances with pleasing and inspiring effect. He has no 
thought of issuing a peremptory decree; the whole letter is per- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 127 


meated with the spirit of freedom. He knows very well that com- 
mands are out of place in connection with these delicate and sacred 
matters, and he knows that theology cannot pass by these ques- 
tions, but that they must be treated most seriously, with liberty 
and courage. He leaves them to theological science. 

But still more pleasing is the effect of the positiveness, the 
frankness and warmth with which the Emperor himself takes his 
stand in these matters. What he has written is from the depth of 
his heart; he utters it just as he thinks and feels it, and he has 
written it down like one who is trying to take account of his own 
mind, with all the minute marks of individual feeling and individ- 
ual experience. He feels his soul bound to Christ, and he is not 
willing to speak of religion without praising him and confessing his 
allegiance to him. 

The Emperor’s utterance professes to be a personal confession 
of faith, and as such it deserves respect. But it would certainly 
not be in accordance with the spirit of the imperial author if we 
were to give no other response than silence. In the Evangelical 
Church the ultimate and supreme questions are always open to dis- 
cussion, and each generation must work out the answers anew. 
Our spiritual life also depends upon crises and finds its very vitality 
in them. How should we be silent when the profoundest and most 
solemn questions challenge us in this form? 

All Evangelical Christians will frankly and joyfully agree with 
the final sentence of the Emperor’s letter: ‘‘ Religion was never 
the result of science, but an overflow of the heart and being of man 
from his intercourse with God.” Theology subscribes to this prop- 
osition ; it knows right well that it does not work creatively, but 
merely tries to follow reverently in thought something that already 
is. 

Not less will be the general accord with the Emperor’s convic- 
tion that religion must have forms, so that we may explain our- 
selves and give mutual instruction, but that these forms cannot be 
imperishable. I think that even Professor Delitzsch has attained 
the capital feature of his purposes in the concession that the cus- 
tomary forms of the current school traditions regarding the Old 
Testament are in urgent need of change. 

But questions and disputes will arise chiefly in connection with 
two convictions expressed by his majesty: the theory of a twofold 
revelation, and the divinity of Christ. And the two are closely con- 
nected. 


128 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


The difference between faith and science in connection with 
religion becomes clear immediately on the mention of the word 
‘‘revelation.”’ Science in the strictest sense cannot admit the no- 
tion at all, finding it too transcendental. On the other hand, faith 
cannot permit itself to be deprived of revelation. But in the course 
of development there has been an approach between the two sides. 
Aside from the reverent contemplation of the universe the Evan- 
gelical faith has ceased to recognise revelation through any medi- 
ums but persons. The whole lower series of alleged revelations 
has been put aside. There are no revelations by means of things. 
The Emperor’s letter also took this ground: the revelations of God 
in his humanity are persons, especially great persons. Now in so 
far as great personages have their mystery even for science in their 
individuality and power, in so far harmony is established between 
faith and science. But the recognition by me and others of these 
personages as revelations of God is an act of subjective experience 
which no science can either create or prevent. 

But upon this common ground the Emperor’s letter distin- 
guishes two sorts of revelation: a general one, and a peculiarly re- 
ligious one. There is a great element of strength in this distinc- 
tion, for it brings out vigorously the fact that there is no more seri- 
ous concern for man than his relation to God, and that everything 
is dependent on this relationship. But on the other hand, the 
thinking mind cannot possibly repose in the assumption of two 
revelations running, as it were, parallel with each other, and the 
imperial letter has given utterance to this observation by putting 
Abraham into both categories. Accordingly there cannot be two 
revelations, —for religion, moral force, and knowledge stand in most 
intimate union,—but one revelation, the bearers of which were, and 
still are, very different in nature and greatness, calling and function. 
If Jesus Christ loses nothing of his individuality and uniqueness 
when he is placed in the series with Moses, Isaiah, and the psalm- 
ists, neither does he suffer by the comparison when we see him in 
the line with Socrates and Plato and the others who are mentiond 
in the Emperor’s letter. The religious conception of history must 
in the last analysis be one and the same: it must be mankind led 
forth by God out of the state of primitive nature, out of error and 
sin, and saved and brought into the estate of the children of God. 
Here, however, we make reservation of the fact that the divine his- 
tory finds its specific line in ancient times in Israel. 

The Christian Church must reject every estimate of Christ 


3ABEL AND BIBLE. 129 


which ignores the difference between him and other masters. He 
himself, his disciples and the history of the world have spoken so 
distinctly on this point that there should be no room for doubt, and 
he still speaks to us in his word as distinctly as to his disciples of 
old. But it may and must be questioned whether the inflexible 
formula ‘divinity of Christ” is the correct one. He himself never 
used it, but chose other designations, and it is at least very doubt- 
ful whether any of his disciples ever uttered it. And the early 
Church, too, did not speak directly of the divinity of Christ, but 
always of his divinity and humanity. ‘‘God-man,” therefore, is the 
only correct formula even in the intent of the ancient dogma. In 
this phrase we have almost restored the mystery which according 
to the will of Christ himself was to remain in this matter. He 
made no secret of the fact that he was the Lord and Saviour, and 
his disciples were expected to observe and experience the fact in 
his words and deeds. But how his relation to the Father arose, 
he withheld from us and kept to himself. In my historical opinion, 
therefore, and according to my feeling in the matter, even the for- 
mula ‘‘man and God” (God-man-hood) is not beyond criticism, 
inasmuch as it has already begun to intrude upon a mystery into 
which we are not permitted to look. 

But the formula may be allowed to stand, because at bottom it 
does not pretend to explain anything, but only protects the extra- 
ordinary from profanation, just as does the expression ‘‘Son of 
God.” The Pauline expression ‘‘God was in Christ’? seems to me 
to be the last word that we are permitted to speak in this matter, 
now that we have liberated ourselves slowly and painfully from the 
erroneous notion of ancient philosophers that we can penetrate the 
mysteries of God and Nature, humanity and history. 

“Tf ye love me, keep my commandments;” ‘‘In this shall 
every one recognise that ye are my disciples, that ye love one an- 
another,’’—it is more important to meditate upon these words and 
try to live up to them than to put the incomprehensible and the 
venerable into formulas. The time is coming and even now is near 
when Evangelical Christians will join hands sincerely in the con- 
fession of Jesus Christ as their master and in the determination to 
follow his words, and our Catholic brethren will then be obliged to 
join with us to the same end. The burden of a long history of mis- 
understandings, of formulas that bristle like swords, of tears and 
blood, weighs upon us, but in it there is also preserved to us a pre- 
cious inheritance. The two seem to be united inextricably, but 


SO BABEL AND BIBLE. 


nevertheless they are gradually separating, although the ‘‘ Let there 
be light”? has not yet been spoken across this chaos. Frankness 
and courage, honesty with ourselves, freedom and love,—these are 
the levers which will lift the burden. ~And the Emperor’s letter 
also is intended to aid in this lofty undertaking. 


M. HALEVY’S OPINION. 


M. Joseph Halévy, the French coryphzus of Oriental research, 
born December 15, 1827, says about Babel and Bible: ‘*Sincerity 
nevertheless compels me to point out certain inept, inaccurate, and 
redundant statements which disfigure this otherwise beautiful lec- 
ture. The meaning of Numbers vi. 26 (page 29, Badel and Bible) 
is perfectly clear in itself and parallel to the passage in Job xxii. 
26. The Babylonian form of expression adds absolutely nothing 
new. There is not a vestige of a proof that the Ur of Kasdim, the 
home of Abraham, is identical with the city of Ur of Babylonia 
(page 4); the appellation Kasdim designates in the Pentateuch 
‘territory which is exclusively Aramean’; Babylonia is called there 
‘the land of Sincar.’ To make a princess of Aryan blood and blond 
complexion out of the wife of Sardanapalus, of whom we have only 
an old and hastily executed sketch; to call the converted Jew Jean 
Astruc ‘zealously orthodox’ (page 41); to attribute to the Koran 
the beautiful legends of the Talmud, and to pass over almost in 
silence the magnificent results of the French excavations in Assyria 
and Babylonia, is carrying cleverness to an unjustified extreme. 
The picture (page 48) of the First Sin, borrowed from Ménant, 
and the comparison of the destruction of Rahab, a name for Egypt 
(Psalms Ixxiv. 13, Ixxxix. 11; Job xxvi. 12), with the splitting in 
twain of the body of the chaotic goddess Tiamat by Marduk, who 
made of it the earth and the heavens, will not stand before exami- 
nation. In the first picture, the man and the woman who are seated 
opposite each other on the two sides of the tree are extending 
toward each other their hands and are not gathering the fruit that 
hangs upon the lower branches of the tree near their feet. And 
furthermore, the undulating line behind the woman is not beyond 
all doubt a serpent. The same disposition to rest content with 
superficial appearances shows itself in the interpretation which is 
put upon Figure 58, page 64, which has no points of resemblance 
with the chariot of Ezekiel. 

‘‘Must it be repeated for the tenth time that the institution of 


BABEL AND BIBLE. ale alk 


Sunday rest is nowhere mentioned in cuneiform literature? The 
abstinences prescribed for the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth (an 
awkward date omitted by the lecturer), twenty-first, and twenty- 
eighth days of the second Elud, which is an exceptional month, 
have nothing whatever to do with the Jewish Sabbath? 

‘¢ Absolutely fantastical also is the attribution of the head of a 
patest or priest-king preserved in the Berlin Museum to the imagi- 
nary and undiscoverable race of Sumerians who, although the origi- 
nators of the great Babylonian civilisation, are said to have been 
unable to count beyond 60! This error is an old one; the number 
6 could never have formed a primitive multiple; the first series 
obtained by actual counting, which is based on the fingers of the 
hand, finds its natural termination at the number 3; Delitzsch has 
confounded instinctive counting with the ar¢ificial or scientific mode 
of computation by 60’s, which has its advantages. We must deplore 
indeed the sad lot of these great allophylian creators of the most 
ancient civilisation who have left as a witness of their vanished 
glory only a single head of stone, fac-similies of which can be found 
by the hundreds in real flesh and blood in the ghettos of Podolia 
and Morocco. 

‘But the acme is reached in the following. Delitzsch affirmed 
in his Paradise that the name Yahveh came from the Sumerian Y 
and the consonants vk. He now declares,—and this is the culmi- 
nation of his lecture,—that he has found on three Babylonian tab- 
lets names belonging to Canaanites established in Babylon, and com- 
posed of the element Yahveh (page 61). Now, the spelling of the 
second form, ya-u-uwm-il (written av), signifies in good Babylonian 
’Yaum [with mimmation for caw = 7#am-mu, Okeanos, god of the sea] 
is god.’ The first form, written ¢a-ah-f7-7/, exhibits a general Se- 
mitic name Va/fféé/ (El covers, protects, DNEM analogous to DNEM), 
The possible reading Vahveh-i// would be equivalent to the Aramean 
ONT, ‘God exists,’ and would not necessarily signify ‘Yahveh is 
god.’ In no case could a name like Yahveh-él be Canaanite-Phe- 
nician; for these people express the verb /o de by 2, and not by 
mn: 

‘With so alluring a subject and before an audience chosen 
from among the highest intellects of the nation, it would have been 
more prudent to limit oneself to established facts, and not to offer 
ephemeral conjectures which can serve no other purpose than to 
dazzle superficial and inquisitive minds.” 


52 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


CORNILL ON ‘‘ BABEL AND BIBLE.” 


‘‘ Babel and Bible offers nothing essentially new to Old Testa- 
ment scholars. There is doubtless not a single professor of Old 
Testament research in any German university that has not already 
told all these things to his students in his lectures on Genesis. And 
Delitzsch does not gainsay this. He maintains only that the world 
at large has as yet heard very little of the silent labors of the As- 
syriologists and that it is now time for this knowledge to burst the 
barriers of the scholars’ study and enter the broad path of life. 

‘If this is to be interpreted as an aspersion upon us scholars, 
it may be answered that we have never treated this knowledge as 
an esoteric doctrine, and that any one who desired any information 
about it had ample opportunity to obtain such, and further that 
there are matters and problems in science concerning which exces- 
sive discretion is the lesser evil. Now, in the exercise of this nec- 
essary discretion Delitzsch has been extremely chary. The im- 
pression that the lecture is apt to make on unprofessional readers 
is that the Bible and its religion is to a certain extent a mere off- 
shoot of Babylonian heathendom which we have ‘in purer and 
more original form’ in Babel; and this impression is intensified by 
the fact that Delitzsch by his own statements actually expects from 
the results of the Assyrio-Babylonian excavations the advent of a 
new epoch in the zzferpretation as well as in the understanding of 
the Old Testament. I shall consider Delitzsch’s statements under 
this point of view. 

‘«The Babylonians also had their shadattu, he says, and ‘there 
can therefore be scarcely the shadow of a doubt that in the last re- 
sort we are indebted to this ancient nation on the banks of the 
Euphrates and the Tigris for the plenitude of blessings that flows 
from our day of Sabbath or Sunday rest.’ What now was this 
Babylonian shadattu? Not the seventh day of each week, for the 
Babylonians regarded the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth, twenty- 
first, and twenty-eighth calendar days of every month as days in 
which no work could be done; and for what reason? For fear of 
the wrath of the gods. These were the days that the Romans 
called dies atri, and are we now to believe that these des atri of the 
Babylonians, which were inseparably linked with the dates of the 
calendar, are our Biblical Sabbath? Never! The Sabbath as the 
‘day of the Lord,’ the view that on one day in every week we 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 133 


should cast aside all the trials and tribulations of our earthly life 
and live for God alone and be happy in communion with Him, is 
exclusively the property of the Bible, and for the ‘plenitude of 
blessings’ contained in it the world is indebted, not to Babel, but 
to Bible. 

‘““We have long known that the Biblical story of the Creation 
(Genesis 1.) reposed on a Babylonian foundation; but the only 
genuinely religious and imperishable fact of this history, the al- 
mighty God, creator of heaven and earth, who speaks and it comes 
to pass, who commands and it is so, the holy personal God, who 
created man in his own image and entrusted him with the duties 
attendant upon morality and a religious life, was given to the 
world, not by Babel, but by Bible. 

«‘And how is it with the story of Paradise and the Fall of Man 
(Genesis ii. and ii1.)? Delitzsch reproduces on page 48 the well- 
known ancient Babylonian clay cylinder which is said to contain a 
pictorial representation of this story. Assyriologists of the stand- 
ing of Oppert, Ménant, Halévy, and Tiele vigorously contest this 
interpretation, even explaining the figures on the cylinder as two 
men, and are absolutely unable to recognise a serpent in the undu- 
latory line in this picture. No Babylonian text corresponding to 
Genesis 111. has yet been discovered, and if the reader of page 38 
of Delitzsch’s book imagines that the clay tablet there mentioned 
containing ‘the Babylonian legend of how it came to pass that the 
first man forfeited the boon of immortality’ is the Biblical story of 
Genesis lii., ‘in much purer and more primitive form,’ I have only 
to say that he is sorely mistaken. But even granting that such is 
the case and that it has been proved that the Babylonians had a 
story according to which the first woman, tempted by the serpent, 
ate of the forbidden fruit and thereby brought sin and death into 
the world, it will be distinctly seen from the picture that, leaving 
everything else out of account, the Babylonian pair are c/othed, and 
that therefore what is perhaps the profoundest and most significant 
feature of the story of Genesis ii. belongs to Bible, and not to 
Babel. 

«¢The conception of angels is without doubt ‘characteristically 
Babylonian.’ But whether they are also such in the Biblical sense 
as so grandly expressed in Psalms xci, verses 11 and 12, and in the 
utterance of Jesus, Matthew xviii. 10, is another question. In the 
Biblical representations Babylonian angels and eunuchs surround 
only the throne of the great king. And before Delitzsch wrote 


134 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


(page 55) his remarks concerning the demons and the devils which 
he says were possible only for the ancient Persian dualism, and 
were so destined to be committed forever and aye to the obscurity 
of the Babylonian hills from which they rose, he should have re- 
called to mind the important rédle which these concepts played in 
the religious life of Jesus, so that we might be justified in saying 
that there are ‘still many Babylonian traits clinging even to the re- 
ligious thoughts’ of Jesus. But these concepts in the Bible are no 
Parsee importation; for the Bible can think of Satan and his an- 
gels under no other form than that of creatures of God who had 
fallen through their own sins and who stand thus on the most essen- 
tial point in the sharpest imaginable contrast with the afore-men- 
tioned Persian dualism. And does Delitzsch mean to say, when 
he affirms that the 5th, 6th, and 7th commandments occur ‘in pre- 
cisely the same order’ in the Babylonian records, that Moses, or 
whoever else composed the Decalogue, sought advice from Babel, 
in the face of the fact that the order of the treasures which man 
seeks to protect, namely, life, family, and property, could not pos- 
sibly be more natural and obvious, and that the humane Baby- 
lonian commandments have also their parallel in the Egyptian 
Book of the Dead ? 

“‘And how do matters stand with the Biblical problems con- 
cerning which we are led to believe that Babel only can explain 
Bible? Delitzsch sees in the Bible Amraphel of Genesis xiv. the 
great Babylonian king Hammurabi, the founder of the old Baby- 
lonian kingdom. I shall not gainsay that this identification is pos- 
sible; and since Amraphel was ‘the contemporary of Abraham’ we 
shall certainly be glad to reckon the period of Abraham by that of 
Hammurabi. But if we consult the Assyriologists we shall find 
that in fixing the chronological place of the fifty-five years of the 
reign of this king they vary between 2394-2339 B. C. and 1923- 
1868 B. C., with all the intermediate possibilities. From the point 
of view of method, therefore, is it not better to follow the plan of 
the Assyriologist Hommel, who, convinced of the correctness of 
the equation Amraphel = Hammurabi, as of the historical authen- 
ticity of the events narrated in Genesis xiv., starts, contrariwise, 
from the Bible and moulds the Babylonian chronology until it ac- 
cords with the Biblical? 

‘‘Delitzsch’s statements (page 61) concerning the three clay 
tablets containing the name of Yahveh are quite new. I cannot 
revive here, much less resolve, the question of the original mono- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 135 


theism of the Semites, or at least of ‘the old Canaanite races which 
settled in Babylonia 2500 years before Christ, and to whom Ham- 
murabi himself belonged’; but I have to confess that I cherish the 
gravest doubts concerning the correctness of the meaning of these 
tablets, or at any rate of the interpretation of the names Va-ah-ve- 
tlu and Ya-hu-um-ilu. Of names containing the proper names of a 
god, and asserting additionally that this god is God, there are no 
instances whatever among the thousands of Semitic proper names 
which we know. Even the well-known Biblical /ve/ does not mean 
‘Yahveh is God.’ But even granting that these old ‘Canaanites’ 
did possess the theophorous name Yahw, is this any proof that they 
also possessed the Biblical concept of Yahveh? How does it hap- 
pen that of these ‘monotheistic’ kings one is called Simmu-dallit 
which means ‘Sin gives life,’ and another is Samsu-tluna, which 
means ‘the sun is our god.’ 

‘<There are also other evidences in Babel and Bible that De- 
litzsch’s statements must be accepted with reserve. We read on 
page 50: ‘In the Book of Job (xxiv. 18), which appears to be ex- 
tremely conversant with Babylenian modes of thought, we find 
comparisons drawn (xxiv. 18 et seq.) between the arid, waterless 
desert which is reserved for those that have sinned, and the garden 
with fresh, clear water which is reserved for the pious.’ I believe 
that I also am tolerably well acquainted with the Book of Job, and 
I was consequently not a little astonished at reading these words, 
for as a matter of fact there is absolutely nothing of the kind in Job 
xxiv. 18, and if Delitzsch possibly introduced this meaning into 
the passage conjecturally, it was entirely inadmissible on his part 
to deal with it as with something that had been absolutely estab- 
lished. 

‘“«Again, the passage on pages 51-52 concerning Mahomet’s 
Paradise, namely: ‘Two and seventy of these Paradisian maidens 
may every god-fearing man choose unto himself, in addition to the 
wives that he possessed on earth, provided he cares to have them 
(and the good man will always cherish desire for the good),’—is 
not to be found at all in the Koran, but has been taken from E. W. 
Lane’s Customs and Manners, part I1., page 59, of the German trans- 
lation. 

‘‘We are delighted and proud that Germany also is at last 
taking an independent part in the excavations in the valley of the 
Euphrates. But in entering upon this undertaking it is only ful- 
filling a national obligation of honor toward the educated world, 


136 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


and no one could entertain greater sympathy with these labors or 
wish them greater success than we theological investigators of the 
Old Testament, for we know the light which will be shed from that 
source upon the object of our studies. But we are far from be- 
leving that @ new interpretation of the Old Testament will ever be 
brought to pass by these investigations, nay we are firmly con- 
vinced that in the struggle between Babel and Bible the Bible will 
ultimately come out victorious. Gunkel spoke for us all when he 
said: 

‘««F[Tow incomparably superior the Hebrew legend is to the 
Babylonian! Should we not really be delighted at having found 
in this Babylonian parallel a criterion for estimating the real sub- 
limity of the conception of God in Israel,—a conception of so much 
intrinsic power that it can purge and recast in such a manner ma- 
terial so repellent and outlandish? And this also we may say, that 
the Babylonian legend strongly impresses us by its barbaric charac- 
ter, whereas the Hebrew legend is far nearer and more human to 
us. Even granting that we have been accustomed from childhood 
to the Hebrew legends, we yet learn from this example that in our 
whole world of ideas we owe far more to these Hebrews than to the 
Babylonians.” 

The same theologian wrote to the editors of Zhe Open Court 
after the appearance of Professor Delitzsch’s First Lecture as fol- 
lows: ‘‘You are to be commended for having made the American 
public acquainted with Delitzsch’s Badvel and Bible, for the little 
book contains an extraordinary amount of stimulating and instruc- 
tive matter, and it has been cleverly constructed, so as to appeal 
at once to the great reading public. Yet while there is no direct 
polemical attack made in it against the Bible, you will nevertheless 
understand that we theologians have witnessed the appearance of 
this essay and the great sensation which it has made with solici- 
tude, nay even with distress; for the impression which it is inevi- 
tably destined to make on the unprepared reader is one that we 
could never wish to see.” 


A ROMAN CATHOLIC VERDICT. 


The Catholic News of New York, a journal ‘‘recommended by 
the Catholic hierarchy and the clergy as a model family paper,” 
takes the following view of the situation: ‘*The school of which 
Professor Delitzsch is a distinguished member is by no means pre- 
occupied about establishing the veracity of the Bible. The gene- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 137 


ral purport of this lecture is to indicate that the Bible has borrowed 
almost all its religious and moral elements from the pagan Assyrians 
and Babylonians, and that it is merely a human compilation. The 
success which has attended the propagation of this view is to be seen 
in the total disintegration of all Protestant belief. It is the climax 
of irony that the sects which broke away from the Catholic Church 
with the cry, ‘A free Bible; the Bible is the sole rule of faith,’ 
are to-day giving up all supernatural belief because they have lost 
faith in the inspiration of the Bible, consequent upon the attacks 
of the higher criticism. Meanwhile the Catholic Church stands un- 
disturbed on her old platform. The Catholic repeats the profession 
of St. Augustine: ‘I would not accept the Bible except on the au- 
thority of the Church.’ He is confident that in the long run, when 
all facts have been garnered and after hasty theories shall have 
been tried and found wanting, the light thrown by science on all 
-the complications of the Biblical question will serve to corroborate 
the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church, whose more than 
human prudence is nowhere more conspicuous than in her few 
guarded but comprehensive declarations concerning the fact and 
the nature of inspiration. Students who may not have time to 
study larger volumes dealing with Assyriology will find this little 
book a handy one to consult for the interpretation given to many 
archeological discoveries by the representatives of the higher criti- 
cism.”’ 


ALFRED JEREMIAS ON DELITZSCH.! 


Alfred Jeremias, in an interesting pamphlet bearing the title 
Im Kampfe um Babel und Bibel, thoroughly reviews the situation 
and calls attention from another point of view to this very topic. 
Confuting the expressions of fear that Assyriological science is 
shaking the foundations of the sanctuary of Holy Scriptures, he 
remarks that it is strange the situation has been so completely re- 
versed with years. In the first periods of Assyriological research, 
the inscriptions on the excavated monuments were stridently ad- 
duced as evidence in corroboration of the traditional views of the 
Bible. It was triumphantly proclaimed that now (Luke xix. 40) 
the very bricks of Babylon cried out in confirmation of the Holy 
Scriptures, and the world should hold its peace. Exact copies of 
the writings of Moses and the children of Israel during their so- 


1Written by Thomas J. McCormack. Extracted from The Ofen Court, Vol. XVII., No. 3, pp. 
130-132. 


138 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


journ in the desert were supposedly recovered from Nabatzan in- 
scriptions; the historical existence of Abraham was confirmed by a 
brick; and the wall was actually discovered on which Belshazzar 
saw written the fateful words, MWene mene tekel upharsin! 

But in Herr Jeremias’s opinion the use of Assyriology as a 
weapon of destructive criticism for the overthrow of the traditional 
Bible is just as wicked as the preceding specimens of its applica- 
tion are stupid. One very advanced critic, cited by Jeremias, goes 
so far even as to wish for the time when the bricks of Babylon shall 
compel a more truthful view of the Old Testament, shall shatter in 
shards the doctrine of inspiration, and pave the way for a deeper, 
more spiritual, and more ‘‘pious” conception. Verily, Babel sas 
“‘Jaid her mailed fist on the Old Testament.” 

But we need have no fear. Orthodoxy and piety may yet lie 
down in harmonious union with Assyriology; and Herr Jeremias, 
who takes both the strictly religious and the strictly scientific view, 
well expresses the terms of the compromise as follows: ‘‘In so far 
as the Old Testament as a document of God’s education of the hu- 
man race may lay claim to being a fides divina, it stands in no need 
of corroboration by any auxiliary science. Here Babel can never 
promote the comprehension of the Old Testament, nor put it to 
hazard in any way, be the philological and scientific imbroglio what 
it may. Any ten of the marked passages of Luther’s Bible are suf- 
ficient to demonstrate! how superior the spirit of the Old Testa- 
ment is to that of Babylon. But the Old Testament has also its 
human side,—a side so stupendously interesting that no literature 
of antiquity can be mentioned with it in the same breath. Much 
of this remained obscure so long as the historical and cultural 
framework in which the life of Israel was enacted was veiled. But 
now the world around about Canaan is flooded with light; we can 
contemplate the people of the Old Testament in their relationship 
with the political and cultural conditions out of which it evolved 
and which have exerted a determining influence upon its destinies. 
In this domain cuneiform research can perform important services 
for the comprehension of the Bible. But the imperishable jewel 
which Israel possesses will shine only more brilliantly under this 
illumination, and likewise the fides humana upon which this unique 
book of literature rests its claims will stand triumphantly the ordeal 
of fire to which it has been subjected.” 


1The most significant passages of the Bible are printed in Luther’s translation in bold-faced 
type. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 139 


There has been little criticism of Delitzsch’s book from the 
side of the Assyriologists proper. There are many points on which 
all Assyriological inquirers do not agree, but upon the whole it is 
the universal verdict of the Assyriologists that Delitzsch’s lecture 
‘‘gives, so far as the monuments are concerned, those facts that 
may be regarded as indubitably established results of cuneiform in- 
quiry.”” And the advantage in the bout will doubtless also remain 
with Delitzsch. For in purely technical and Assyriological matters 
it is with him, as opposed to most of his theological critics, a case 
of Krupp guns against ‘‘halberds and blunderbusses.”’ 


HIGHER CRITICISM AND THE EMPEROR. 
BY DR. PAUL CARUS. 
Manager of The Open Court Publishing Co. 

Emperor William criticises Delitzsch for ‘‘abandoning the 
standpoint of the strict historian” and ‘‘straying into religious and 
historical conclusions and hypotheses which are quite nebulous and 
bold.” He says that ‘‘Delitzsch the theologian has run away with 
Delitzsch the historian.” 

The Emperor means to say that in his historical research work 
Delitzsch is carried away by his liberal theological views; but the 
case is probably just the reverse. Professor Delitzsch, the son of 
an equally famous Hebrew scholar and a pious Christian, was from 
the start an orthodox theologian, and his theology was modified 
under the influence of his historical investigations. The Emperor, 
who still clings to the old conception, concedes that ‘‘the Old Tes- 
tament contains many sections which are of a purely human and his- 
torical nature,” and goes even so far as to add that they ‘‘are xo? 
God’s revealed word.” He declares ‘‘that the legislative act on 
Sinai, for example, can only be symbolically regarded as inspired 
of God.” Apparently the Emperor makes a difference between the 
Jewish and the Christian Scriptures, and in this sense he says: 
‘¢Neither does it matter that much of the nimbus of the chosen 
people will thereby disappear.” 

The Emperor’s letter is an important document in the evolu- 
tion of religion. He is a pronounced upholder of militant and 
pious Protestantism, and his views may be regarded as typical for 
large classes of all Protestant denominations. 

The struggle over Babel and Bible opens to the Christian laity 
a period of discussion concerning the nature of the Old Testament 
which is bound to lead to an investigation of the New Testament. 


140 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


The battle concerning the Old Testament is as good as ended. 
Whether or not Delitzsch is right in his sundry contentions as to 
the names ‘‘ El” and ‘‘ Yahveh,”’ the identification of the Ruins of 
Mugheir with the home of Abraham, and his interpretation of Baby- 
lonian seal-cylinders, is quite indifferent. The essential point lies 
deeper and there is no need to conceal it. No one who has investi- 
gated the subject will any longer deny that the Old Testament is 
the product of an historical evolution. Of course, it is Jewish, not 
Babylonian ; nevertheless, the Babylonian civilisation forms the 
background, and many things which were formerly believed to 
have been dictated by the Holy Ghost are now seen to be the nat- 
ural outcome of historical conditions. But on that account the 
nimbus of the chosen people will no more disappear than the glory - 
of Homer, and Phidias, and Pericles, and Socrates can be dimmed 
because we can trace their greatness to conditions and understand 
how they naturally grew and rose into being. 

The old narrow view cannot be abandoned at once, and many 
intermediate steps are being taken which attempt compromises. So 
we read for instance in the interesting pamphlet of Alfred Jeremias 
that we must grant the prevalence of a monotheism among the pa- 
gan nations long before the rise of Israel as a nation. Hammurabi, 
for instance, a contemporary of Abraham who lived more than half 
a millennium before Moses, introduces his code of laws with the 
invocation, ‘‘Thus speaketh ILU SIRU, i. e., God the Supreme.” 
‘‘But,” adds Professor Jeremias, ‘‘there is this difference between 
the pagan monotheism which can be traced among all the nations, 
and Hebrew monotheism, that ‘God himself filled the latter with 
his own revelation.” In other words, when Plato speaks of God, 
we have to deal with a purely human speculation, but when David 
danced before the ark of the Lord we are expected to believe that 
then God was personally present. 

The truth is, we are familiar with the Hebrew view, for our 
own belief has developed out of it. We are not so familiar with 
pagan views. Therefore when Zarathustra speaks of Ahura Mazda, 
the Lord Omniscient, we admire his wisdom, but fail to find any 
connection with our own belief. The term sounds strange to our 
ears because it remains unassociated with our prayers and has no 
relation to the traditions that have become sacred to us. It ap- 
pears as the natural product of human thought, while the Hebrew 
names Jehovah, Zebaoth, Elohim, even when the context betrays 
a pagan or even polytheistic conception, are filled with a sanctity 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 141 


and a religious awe that is to us the evidence of a supernatural 
revelation. 

How true this is appears from the fact that the original and 
correct form Yahveh, which is not used in our churches, does not 
possess the same sacred ring to our ears as the corrupted form Je- 
hovah. The name Yahveh is written in our brains, not in our 
hearts. Yahveh is the name of a deity with which we have become 
acquainted through the study of Hebrew literature, and we would 
deem it all but a sacrilege, a kind of paganism, to pray to Yahveh 
or to sing hymns to him. The word Jehovah, an unmeaning and 
positively nonsensical combination of the consonants of the word 
‘<Jahveh,” with the vowels of another, ‘‘Adonai,” was invented in 
the days of Luther. It was unknown before the year 1519; but 
having slipped into our prayers, we still sing the triumphal strain, 
‘¢ Jehovah is King.” 

When we become acquainted with the monotheism of Ham- 
murabi, we put him down as a philosopher, but the God of Moses 
is the same God to whom Christians bend the knee. That makes 
a difference. The associations with our own religious life, our 
forms of worship, our prayers, are important for obvious psycho- 
logical reasons. 

Through Delitzsch, the Emperor became familiar with the re- 
ligion of ancient Babylon, and he took a liking to the Assyrians. 
The Assyrian guards were so much like the Prussian grenadiers ; 
‘their kings were generals enjoying the display of armies; they be- 
lieved in the religion of the mailed fist and bestowed much atten- 
tion upon military attire, even as to the minute details of hair- 
dressing. While the Emperor’s court barber patented the fashion 
of an upturned mustache under the name “s ¢s¢ erretcht, which 
means ‘‘surpassing all,’ Delitzsch speaks of the official style of 
the Assyrian beard as Woch nicht erreicht, i. e., ‘still unsurpassed.” 
Whether Delitzsch intended the joke or was serious in making this 
comparison we have no means to tell. Certainly the similarities 
were so many and so striking that the Emperor felt the thrill of 
kinship and showed himself willing to transfer the nimbus from 
the chosen people to the rulers of ancient Babylon. 

Truly, the Emperor is right when he says that ‘*God reveals 
himself continuously in the race of men.” It is a good old doc- 
trine, and orthodox too, that ‘‘God spoke not to Moses alone,” and 
St. John the Evangelist says that ‘‘that was the true light which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” 


142 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


But it is natural that Christians raised in the traditional dog- 
matism should shrink from the idea that the New Testament (as 
well as the Old) should be conceded to be the product of historical 
conditions. ‘‘ Here,” they argue, ‘‘Christ speaks himself,” and (to 
use the Emperor’s own words) ‘‘Christ is God, God in human form 
.... We have in Him God’s revealed word, and He never lies.” 

Certainly, God never lies. But do we have in the New Testa- 
ment Christ’s own words? We have reports about Jesus, and these 
reports are as human as are the Scriptures of the Old Testament. 
Christianity would be in a sad plight if the New Testament had in- 
deed to be regarded as inspired verbatim by God. We cannot en- 
ter here into details but would suggest only that the mere contra- 

#& Xictions in the Gospels alone force us to look upon them as human 
compositions. 

The difficulties of regarding the Bible as literally the word of 
God are almost greater in the New Testament than in the Old. 
Any one who has studied the Scriptures knows that the problem is 
grave and cannot be easily disposed of. 

The great question back of all these discussions is simply this ° 
‘¢«Shall we, or shall we not, grant Science the right to modify Re- 
ligion?”’ And the question need not be answered. Men of science 
know that whether or not we grant science the right to modify reli- 
gion, science is shedding her light upon religious problems, and 
she is constantly and continuously modifying religion. Science 
(represented in physics, astronomy, physiology, psychology, his- 
tory, text-criticism, etc., etc.) has enlarged our view of the world 
and deepened our conception of God. The scientific spirit of the 
age has begotten a new theology, a truly scientific treatment of the 
problems of God, inspiration, and revelation, which we call theon- 
omy, for it ranges as high above the antiquated theology as astron- 
omy is superior to astrology.! 

After all, Christians are not pledged to dogmas, but to the 
truth. Orthodoxy means the right doctrine, and the right doctrine 
is that which can stand the test of critique. Orthodoxy so called 
is a misnomer and ought to be called dogmatism. The truth can 
be found only by searching, and the methods of an exact search 
are called science. 

Science is not human; science is divine, and the development 


1Cf. the writer’s articles ‘‘ Theology as a Science”’ in The Monist, Vol. XII., No. 4, and Vol 
XIII.,; No. x. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 143 


of science is the coming of the spirit of God,—of the true God, of 
the God of Truth, who is ‘‘the light that lighteth every man.” 

The dogmas of Christianity are formulations of the Truth as 
interpreted by our forefathers. Let no Athanasius with his limited 
knowledge bind the conscience of a Delitzsch. Had Delitzsch lived 
in the days of the Alexandrian church-father, he would most likely 
have acquiesced in the Nicene formulation of the Christian creed ; 
but new issues have arisen and some of the traditional beliefs have 
become untenable. Dogmas may be venerable on account of their 
antiquity, but they cannot stand against Truth. Truth alone is 
holy, and the Truth of Science will finally win the day. 

The struggle for Babel and Bible is important not on its own 
account but because it forces upon us in anew form the issue of 
Science versus Faith, and compels us to revise our conception of the 
nature of divine revelation. It is a mere skirmish which will soon 
be followed by the more important struggle over the Gospels. The 
issues at stake are graver there, and thus we anticipate that the 
latter will be a more bitter and obdurate battle. The main histor- 
ical questions of Christianity lie in the New Testament, and though 
Assyriology contributes its goodly share toward the solution of the 
religious problem, it is after all a side issue only, which must be 
complemented by work along other lines of research. 

Delitzsch sums up his position in these words: ‘Do not let 
us blindly cling to dogmas which science has shown to be super- 
annuated, merely for fear of abandoning them. Faith in God and 
the true religion may thereby be injured.” 

Whatever the final result of the present discussion shall be, 
we may rest assured that the modification of our religious faith will 
not be for the worse. Christianity has again and again adapted it- 
self to a more scientific conception of the world. How strong was 
the opposition of the so-called orthodox to the Copernican system, 
how fierce were their attacks on the doctrine of evolution! But 
that is now a matter of the past, and religion has certainly been 
broadened as well as deepened by a broader and deeper insight 
into the constitution of nature. 

The task of the theology of to-day is a reconstruction of our 
conception of Christianity upon a strictly scientific basis. In the 
background of the several historical questions there is looming up 
the struggle for a scientific world-conception, and rightly considered, 
the philosophical problem is the main issue which over-shadows all 
others. 


144 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


It is not difficult to foresee the final result of the whole move- 
ment. It will not lead to a destruction of religion, but to its puri- 
fication and reconstruction upon a more solid foundation. There- 
fore let us have faith in the Truth. 

Says Esdras: ‘‘As for the truth, it endureth, and is always 
strong; it liveth and conquereth for evermore. 

‘*With her there is no accepting of persons or rewards; but 
she doeth the things that are just, and refraineth from all unjust 
and wicked things; and all men do well like of her works. 

‘Neither in her judgment is any unrighteousness ; and she is 
the strength, kingdom, power, and majesty of all ages. Blessed 
be the God of Truth.” (1 Esdras iv. 38-40. ) 


Ree yY TO CRITICS OF THE FIRST LECTURE. 


THE ETHICAL, ASPECT: 


In his Der Kampf um Babel und Bibel, p. 20 ff., Professor 
Samuel Oettli says: ‘‘The materials transmitted to us in the Old 
Testament have been plunged into an atmosphere of ethical mono- 
theism and purified by this bath from all ethically or religiously 
confused and confusing elements. We no longer find the deluge 
here as the product of the blind wrath of a god, but as the ethically 
warranted punishment sent by a just god upon a degenerate race.” 

This is an error. Even the report of Berosus shows us that to 
fhe Babylonians also the world-flood was a sin-flood.! Consider 
his words: ‘‘The others cried aloud when a voice commanded 
them to fear God, as Xisuthros had been translated to the gods 
because he had been godfearing.” While we may assure ourselves 
from this alone that the Babylonian Noah escaped from the judg- 
ment of the deluge because of his piety and the remainder of man- 
kind were destroyed because of their ever-increasing sinfulness, 
the inference is confirmed by the words in the cuneiform inscrip- 
tion, spoken by Ea after the deluge to Bel who had caused it: 
‘¢Lay up his sin against the sinner,” etc. 

Professor Edward Konig, in his essay Bibel und Babel, p. 32, 
says: ‘‘The spirit of the two traditions (Babylonian and Hebrew) 
is totally different. This is shown by a single feature: The Baby- 
lonian hero rescues his inanimate as well as his living property, 
while in both the Bible accounts we have the higher point of view 
represented by the rescue of the living creatures only.” What 
blind zeal! Even in the fragment of Berosus we read that Xisu- 
thros was commanded to ‘‘take in winged and fourfooted animals,”’ 
and the original cuneiform account says expressly: ‘‘I brought up 
into the ship the cattle of the field and the wild beasts of the field.” 


1An untranslatable German pun and popular etymology (Sintflut = ‘‘ universal flood ’’: Siind- 
flut = “ sin-flood ’’). 


146 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Accordingly, the ‘‘higher point of view”? must be conceded to the 
Babylonian account by Ké6nig himself. 


THE PRIMORDIAL CHAOS. 

With reference to mythological features in the Biblical account 
of the creation something further may be said. Oettli remarks with 
much truth, p. 12, on the presumption of the existence of a chaos: 
‘«‘The notion of a primitive matter which was not derived from 
God’s creative activity but which had rather to be overcome by it, 
cannot have grown up on soil of the Religion of Israel, which is 
strictly monotheistic in its thought, at least on the prophetic 
heights, and consequently excludes the dualistic conflict of two 
hostile primitive principles.” I call attention here to the remark 
of Wellhausen also: ‘‘If we take Chaos for granted, everything 
else is developed out of this; everything else is reflection, syste- 
matic construction, which we can figure out with little difficulty.” 


TRACES OF POLYTHEISM. 

In the Elohistic account of the creation also there are traces 
of polytheistic elements. When we read (Genesis i. 26): ‘‘Let us 
make men in our! own image, after our semblance,” Oettli says 
with justice: ‘‘Moreover, that plural of self-appeal preceding the 
creation of man is not so easily to be reconciled with the later strict 
monotheism, nor the ‘image of God’ in which man is created, 
with the spirituality of Yahveh which is afterwards so strongly em- 
phasised, when once, rejecting all exegetic arts, we give to words 
their simple and obvious meaning. And this, notwithstanding the 
fact that the Biblical author, in accordance with his religious posi- 
tion, has given a higher value to these originally foreign elements.” 

In fact, Genesis i. 26 and Isaiah xlvi. 5 are in irreconcilable 
opposition. The polytheistic coloring of Genesis i. 27 with its im- 
plied distinction of gods and goddesses would appear peculiarly 
drastic it the three members of the sentence are thought of as quite 
closely connected: ‘‘And God created man in his own image, in 
the image of God created He him, male and female created He 
them” But we cannot regard this as sure. 


BABYLONIAN MONOTHEISM. 
It may be recalled that I said in my first lecture: ‘‘ Despite 
the fact that free and enlightened minds publicly taught that Nergal 


1The assumption that we have here a case of fluvalis majestaticus is not, indeed, precluded 
by general Hebrew usage, but it is far-fetched; compare 1ii 2, the saying of Yahveh: ‘Lo, man 
has become as one of us.” 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 147 


and Nebo, moon-god and sun-god, the thunder-god Ramman and 
all the other gods were one in Marduk, the god of light, polytheism 
remained for three thousand years the state religion of Babylon.” 

Jensen has felt warranted in accompanying this remark with 
the following observations, which have been carried further by 
K6nig and others with much gratification, as was to be expected: 
<«This would indeed be one of the most significant discoveries ever 
made in the realm of the history of religion, and therefore we must 
regret exceedingly that Delitzsch does not cite his source. I be- 
lieve that I may declare with all positiveness that nothing of the 
sort can be derived from the texts that are accessible to me. There- 
fore we beg urgently that he publish soon the text of the passage 
which deprives Israel of the greatest glory that has hitherto illu- 
mined that race,—that of being the only one that worked its way 
out into pure monotheism.” 

Very good, if indeed Jensen stands by his expression, Israel is 
now actually deprived of this its greatest glory, and this by the 
Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablet 81, 11-3, 111, known since 1895 
and published in the Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Instt- 
tute by Theo. G. Pinches,—a tablet which is indeed preserved only 
as a fragment, but the remaining portion of which shows us that 
upon it all the divinities of the Babylonian pantheon (or at least 
the chief ones) are indicated as being one with and one in the god 
Marduk. I quote only a few lines :4 

‘¢The god Marduk is written and called Ninib as the possessor 
of power, Nérgal or perhaps Zamama as lord of combat or of battle, 
Bél as possessor of dominion, Nebo as lord of business (?), Sin as 
illuminator of the night, Samas as lord of all that is right, as lord 
of rain.”’ , 

Accordingly, Marduk is Ninib as well as Nergal, moon-god as 
well as sun-god, etc., in other words, the names Ninib and Nergal, 
Sin and Samas are only various designations of the one god Mar- 
duk; they are all one with him and in him. Is this not ‘‘indoger- 
manic monotheism, the doctrine of the unity which develops only 
out of variety’’? 


1 il Nin-ib Marduk sa alli 
il Nérgal Marduk sa kablu 
il Za-ma-ma Marduk sa tahazi 
il Bé'l Marduk sa bé’litu u mitluktu 
ilNabai Marduk sa nikasi 
ilSin Marduk munammir miasi 
ilSamas Marduk sa kénati 


ilAddu Marduk sa zunnu 


148 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


THE NAME “EL.” 


On il, 28 God.—All Semitic prepositions were originally sub- 
stantives. For the preposition 7X, which is originally 2/7, <‘toward, 
to, at,” the fundamental significance which from the start seems 
most probable, ‘‘aim, direction,” is still preserved in Hebrew, al- 
though this was until recently overlooked. It is found in the 
phrase, ‘‘ This or that is 77} 282,” that is, ‘at the disposal of thy 
hand,” ‘‘it is in thy control.” 

The opinion that >8 in this phrase means ‘‘power” may have 
the support of tradition, like thousands of other errors in the He- 
brew lexicography, but it has never been demonstrated, and there- 
fore it is not true, as Kénig declares (p. 38), that ‘‘e/ is surely equiv- 
alent to ‘power’ or ‘strength.’” The only meaning that can be 
demonstrated is ‘‘aim, direction,” which carries with it as a matter 
of course the concrete significance ‘‘that toward which one directs 
himself, end, goal.” 

The Sumerians conceived of their gods as dwelling up above 
where the eye of man is directed, in and over the sky; we ourselves 
use ‘‘heaven”’ figuratively for ‘‘God” (comp. Daniel iv. 23); and 
furthermore, a Babylonian psalm calls the sun-god digzl irsitim 
rapostim, the ‘‘goal of the wide world,” that is, the end toward 
which the eyes of all the earth-dwellers are directed, and, finally, 
the poet of the Book of Job (xxxvi. 25), in harmony with an abun- 
dance of other passages in Semitic literatures, glorifies God as the 
one ‘‘on whom all eyes hang, toward whom man looks from afar.”’ 
And just so the earliest Semites called the ‘‘divine” being whom 
they conceived of as dwelling in the heavens above and ruling 
heaven and earth 7/, e/, ‘that toward which the eye is directed,’ 
(cp. the analogous application of 92 to God and things divine in 
Hosea xi. 7). In my opinion the first and original meaning of the 
word is ‘‘goal of the eye,” as is the case with the sun and the sky. 

Inasmuch as 2/7 is thus demonstrated to have the meaning 
‘‘aim, goal,” and as the designation of the deity by this word is 
perfectly in accord with the Semitic habit of thought, and it is 
therefore not permissible to assume another primitive noun z/, my 
interpretation of e/, the name of God, is established in every point. 

It is just as useless and impermissible to seek after a verb cor- 
responding to such a primitive noun as 2 (see Konig, p. 38), as to 
seek after a verbal stem to match others of these most ancient bi- 
consonantal nouns, such as jvm, ‘“‘day,’’ or mut, ‘*man.”’ 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 149 


Besides, the etymology of the word 77, e/ is not the most im- 
portant consideration. The chief thing is rather the fact that those 
North-Semitic tribes which we find established about 2500 B. C. 
both north and south of Babylon, and whose greatest monarch in 
later times (about 2250) was King Hammurabi, conceived of and 
worshipped God as a unitary, spiritual being. Let it be observed 
that this applies to the North-Semitic tribes which had in part im- 
migrated to Babylonia and afterwards established themselves 
there, zo¢ to Sumerian-Semitic Babylonians. 

A number of journals have represented it as my opinion that 
‘even the Jewish conception of God was derived from the Baby- 
lonian cosmology”; and Oettli (p. 4) says that in my view even 
“the name and the worship of Yahveh himself, united with a more 
or less definitely developed monotheism, was a primitive posses- 
sion of Babylon.” But these are misrepresentations. 

As to those names of persons which occur so frequently in the 
time of the first Babylonian dynasty, K6énig is utterly mistaken in 
declaring (p. 40, 42) that among notorious polytheists the names 
must needs be translated and interpreted as ‘‘a god hath given”; 
and so is Oettli (p. 23) when he asks: ‘*Who can prove that those 
names are not to be taken polytheistically, ‘a@ god hath given,’ ‘a 
god be with me’’’? To say nothing of other reasons, this interpre- 
tation breaks down in the case of such names as //u-amranut, ‘‘God 
consider me!” //u-téiram, ‘*God, turn thee hither again!” and 
others. Or, on the other hand, are we to cease to render 2dd-7/u 
‘Gate of God,” and say ‘‘Gate of a god”? No! For the time of 
Hammurabi we hold fast to those beautiful names which signify so 
much for the history of religion: //u-7ttva, ‘‘God be with me,” Z/u- 
amtahar, ‘‘1 called upon God,” //u-abi, Llu-milki, «God is my fa- 
ther,” or ‘‘my counsel,” Jarbz-2lu, ‘*Great is God,” J/amlik-ilu, 
‘¢God sits in power,” /ési-¢na-7l7, ‘Through God came he into be- 
ing,” Avel-zlu, ‘‘Servant of God,” Aut(um)-ilu, <‘Man of God” 
(= Methuscha’el), //éma-le’t, ‘‘God is mighty,” //ima-abi, ‘*God 
is my father,” //zima-ilu, ‘‘God is God,” Summa-tlu-lé-ilia, “If God 
were not my God,” and so on. 

The names must of course be judged collectively. In the case 
of certain of them (as in certain Assyrian names, like Na’id-ilu) we 
might certainly see in ‘‘God” merely an appellative, as perhaps in 
the phrase from the laws of Hammurabi: mahar-t/7/, to assert any- 
thing ‘‘before God”; or in the phrase that occurs hundreds of 
times in the Babylonian contracts of that period, ‘‘to swear by God 


150 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


(zZu) and the king” (cp. 1 Samuel xii. 3, 5: ‘‘by Yahveh and the 
king”), but taking them all together it seems to me that they make 
it impossible to think that z7« means a ‘‘city or family god,” or the 
‘‘special tutelary deity.” 

Precisely in ‘‘the endeavor of a people without philosophical 
development to be as concrete and specific as possible in its notions 
and expressions,” we should inevitably expect to find in each case 
the name of the particular divinity intended, or on the other hand 
if the tutelary divinity of the family or of the infant was meant we 
should expect to find ‘‘my God,” or ‘*his God.” An unprejudiced 
and unsophisticated consideration of all these and other names of 
the Hammurabi period leads rather to the renewed assumption that 
they are rooted in a religious conception different from the poly- 
theistic views that were native in Babylon. What was the nature 
and value of that monotheism the contemporary sources do not 
enable us to determine, but only to infer them from the later de- 
velopment of ‘‘ Yahvism.”’ 


THE NAME ‘'YAHVEH.” 


We must insist with all positiveness that in the two names 
Ya-a’-ve-tlu and Ya-ve-ilu the reading Ya’ve is the only one that 
can be regarded as within the realm of possibility. 

The assault upon my reading—which in the light of our pres- 
ent knowledge is irrefutable—has revealed a lamentable state of 
ignorance in the critics: this ignorance may account for the mis- 
cellaneous insinuations which have been indulged in, as when Pro- 
fessor Kittel ventures to speak of my reading as a ‘partisan ma- 
NEUVEer;: 

In order to at least correct this ignorance, I beg to make the 
following brief and condensed exposition of the matter for the ben- 
efit of my theological critics and of certain of the Assyriologists 
who have volunteered to advise them. The sign zz has the follow- 
ing syllabic values: pz; zal; tu; tam, and besides in Babylonian in 
particular: ”¢/,,; m*/vad; a; (vu), or as would be perhaps bet- 
ter: ve; va; a; (vw). But any one who has become measurably 
familiar with the style of writing of the Hammurabi period knows 
that, even if the reading YVa-’w-ma be granted, this md@ cannot pos- 
sibly be interpreted as the emphasising particle ma. Accordingly 
Konig (p. 48 f.) and Kittel and others are mistaken; on the con- 
trary, ma is without exception written with its customary sign. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 151 


Thus the interpretation of the names in question as ‘‘Ya, Ya’u is 
God” is absolutely precluded. Let him who denies this cite one 
single instance in which the emphatic particle ma is written with 
the character vw. And in the case of Va-w#-wm t/u, | may remark 
incidentally, the # may be only mimation and not an abbreviated 
ma. 

Neither is the reading proposed by Bezold, Va-’a-d7-/u, pos- 
sible, for in the time of Hammurabi the sign 47 does perhaps rep- 
resent also the syllable fz, but the reverse, sign vz for 7, is never 
the case. And on mature reflection the reading Va-(a)’-pv-zlu can- 
not be considered. It is true that the sign vz is found for fz in the 
time of Hammurabi, as frequently in the contracts published by 
Meissner in his Bettrdge sum altbabylonischen Privatrecht, and also 
in the Code of Hammurabi, but the regular sign for fZ occurs much 
more frequently. For instance, in the 79 letters from this very 
period, published by King, #2 is represented exclusively by its regu- 
lar sign. 

Besides this, a ‘‘canaanitish”’ verb form 7a’fz, zapi could be 
derived only from a stem mpm, which does not exist. Instead of 
Ya(’)ve ilu we might then at most read Ya-(’a/w-)vd/u-i/u, with 
radical v, but by this very emendation we should expose ourselves 
to the dreaded recognition of a god mim. Accordingly my reading 
Ya-a’-ve-tlu, Ya-ve-ilu remains the most obvious as well as the only 
one deserving serious consideration. 

I venture on the interpretation of the name Ya(’)ve-2/u with 
less confidence than on the reading of it. The interpretation pro- 
posed by KGnig (p. 50), ‘‘May God protect” (why not, ‘‘Maya 
god protect”?), from Arabic ama, ‘‘to protect,” as well as that 
of Barth (p. 19), ‘‘God gives life” ( Ya-ah-ve-ilu), is highly improb- 
able. As names from a foreign language they would needs appear 
as Vahve-tlu, not Va’ve-ilu or even Yéve-ilu, and only in the last ex- 
tremity would one be justified in the assumption that these foreign 
personal names had gradually been Babylonised in pronunciation, 
at the same time becoming wholly unintelligible. No, if we are to 
concede that there is a verb-form contained in ya’ve, yéve, then it is 
certainly the most obvious thing to think of the verb 7yn, the older 
form of mq which is assumed in Exodus iii. 14, and to interpret it 
with Zimmern as ‘‘God exists.”” My interpretation, ‘‘Ja’ve is 
God,” would accordingly remain by far the most probable in and 
of itself. 


152 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


THE NAME “YAHUM-ILU.” 


The name Ya dé-um-tlu is and remains a foreign name. It 
belongs among the North-Semitic tribes, more precisely Canaan- 
itic. Among these tribes there is no other god Ya-z but the god 
WW, Vahw, that god who is contained in the name Ya-z-ha-si and 
others. 

Now this name of the divinity Yaz which is found at the be- 
ginning and especially at the end of Hebrew names of persons, is 
the shorter form of Yahve, ‘‘the Existing,” and consequently pre- 
supposes the fuller form Yahve. Now even to the Jews of the exilic 
and post-exilic periods the name Yahveh was by no means a nomen 
ineffabile, as is shown by the many names of this later time: YVa-se’- 
va-a-va = Isaiah (WYY?), Pi-Z/-ya-a-va, and others. So much the less 
could it have been such to that primitive period in which the name 
of God, Yahveh, was very far from possessing the sanctity which it 
was to attain later in Israel. 

The name Vahum-ilu, therefore, presupposes a fuller equiva- 
lent name Ya’ve-z/u. Now when such a name is really twice docu- 
mented, in Ya’-ve-zlu, Va-ve-i/u, should it not be recognised as such 
without reserve, and the more so as the refusal to recognise it will 
after all not obliterate the fact of the existence of the North-Semitic 
(‘*Canaanitic”’) name of the divinity Vahz, which is perfectly iden- 
tical with Yahveh, nor the existence of a name Vahd-zlu, ‘‘Yahu is 
God,” similar to the Hebrew 8% (Joel), a thousand years before 
the prophet Elijah’s utterance upon Carmel, ‘‘Yahveh is God” 
(1 Kings xvili. 39)? 

It needs no demonstration to convince competent judges that 
Barth’s interpretation (p. 19) of Va-hu-um-ilu as abbreviated from 
Ya-ah-we-tlu must be rejected. 

Jensen too regards it as ‘‘certainly in the highest degree prob- 
able that both composita contain the name of God Vaveh- Vahu,” 
adding very correctly: ‘‘Now since the Ya’wa in the name cannot 
be of Assyrio-Babylonian origin, it is surely of foreign origin, and 
hence, in all probability, the whole name is ‘Canaanitic,’ and its 
wearers, or wearer, also ‘Canaanites.’”’ But when he goes on to 
say: ‘‘But because a Miller or a Schultze is met with in Paris, we 
are not warranted in assuming that the Germans are the prevalent 
race in Paris; and just as little does an Ya’wa-i/(w), appearing in 
Babylon 2000 years ago, need to prove anything more than that 
the bearers of this name occasionally came to Babylon,”—when he 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 153 


reasons thus I confidently leave it to the unprejudiced reader to 
decide whether, in view of all the names like Vardi-tlu, Vamlik-ilu, 
and so on (not to mention Hammurabi, Ammi-sadiga, and other 
Canaanitish names), the delicate parallel of Miiller and Schulze is 
even remotely justified. Furthermore, even Jensen is compelled, 
as we see, to admit that the evidence is good for the existence of 
the divine name Yahve ( Yahvu) before 2000 B.C. Moreover, Zim- 
mern makes this concession: ‘‘Even supposing that we have in 
ya-u-um the name of a divinity, which ts not improbable, and even 
the name Vahu, Vahve, which ts possible.” That is enough for the 
present; the admission of the reading Ya-(a@’)ve and of my inter- 
pretation will probably follow. 

And accordingly, if Ya-%-wm holds its own as equivalent to 
we, i, then the names of that same period: //u-édinnam, ‘God 
hath given,” Sd-z/, ‘‘Belonging to God,” //u-amtahar, ‘<1 called 
upon God,” //u-teéram, ‘‘God, turn to me,” etc., may with double 
right be regarded as equivalent in their content to the correspond- 
ing Hebrew names. 


PROCESSIONS OF THE GODS. 


Jensen would not countenance my proposition that processions 
of Gods are mentioned in Isaiah. We read (xlv. 20): ‘*They 
have no knowledge that carry their graven image of wood, and pray 
unto a God that cannot help,” and again (xlvi. 1): ‘‘ Bel has sunk 
down, Nebo is bowed down, their idols are fallen to the lot of the 
beasts and to the cattle, the things (i. e., fabrications) that ye car- 
ried about are made a load, a burden to the weary beasts.” There 
can be but few commentators here who do not think in connection 
with these passages of the Babylonian processions of the gods, in 
which Bel and Nebo were carried in ceremonious progress through 
the streets of Babel. 


AARON’S BLESSING.! 


What I have said as to the significance of the phrase in the 
Aaronite blessing, ‘‘ Yahveh lift up his countenance to thee,’ i. e., 
‘‘turn his favor, his love, towards thee,’’ holds good in spite of my 
critics. When spoken of men, ‘‘to lift the countenance to any one 
or to anything” means nothing more than ‘‘to look up at” (so it is 
usedvin 2 Ki. 1x2 32).. It is used in Job xxu. 26 (cf. x1. 15), as well 
as in 2 Sam. il. 22, with reference to a man who, free from guilt 


1Num. vi. 24 ff. 


154 BABEL AND BIBLE. 
and fault, can look up’God and to his fellow-men. This meaning, 
of course, is not appropriate if the words are spoken of God. Then 
it must mean precisely the same thing as the Assyrian, ‘‘to raise 
the eyes to anyone,” that is to say, to find pleasure in one, to direct 
one’s love towards him; therefore not quite the same as to take 
heed of one (as in Siegfried-Stade’s Hebraisches Worterbuch, p. 441). 
If it were so, ‘‘the Lord lift up his countenance to thee” would be 
equivalent to ‘‘the Lord keep thee.” When Jensen (af. czz., col. 
491) insists that the Assyrian expression is literally, not to lift up 
‘‘the face,” but to lift up ‘‘the eyes,” he might with equal justice 
deny that Assyrian 47+ Amman means the same thing as the He- 
brew ené Ammon. In fact, whereas the prevailing Hebrew usage 
is ‘‘if it be right in thine eyes,” the Assyrian says in every case, 
‘af it be right in thy countenance” (za pdanika; cf. summa [ina] 
ban sarrt mahir); ‘‘eyes” and ‘‘countenance” interchange in such 
phrases as this. 

In Hebrew we find ‘‘to lift up the eyes to one”’ used as equiv- 
alent to ‘‘to conceive an affection for one,” only with reference to 
human, sensual love (Gen. xxxix. 7). The value of the Assyrian 
phrase, ‘‘to lft up the eyes to any one,” in its bearing on the 
Aaronite blessing, rests in the fact that it is used with preference 
(though not exclusively, as Jensen thinks) of the gods who direct 
their love towards a favored person or some sacred spot. In reply 
to Jensen who claims (p. 490) that the choice of my example of 
the usefulness of Assyrian linguistic analogies is ‘‘a failure,” I 
comfort myself with the thought that the recognition of our in- 
debtedness as to a deepening of the meaning of the Aaronite bless- 
ing to cuneiform literature, was many years ago publicly endorsed 
by no lesser one than Franz Delitzsch. 

J. Barth attacks on trivial grounds my statement that Canaan 
at the time of the Israelite Incursion, was a ‘‘domain completely 
pervaded by Babylonian culture.” This fact, however, obtains 
ever wider recognition. Alfred Jeremias in the ‘‘Zeztgeist” of the 
Berliner Tageblatt, February 16, 1903, says: ‘‘Further, at the time 
of the immigration of the ‘children of Israel,’ Canaan was sub- 
ject to the especial influence of Babylonian civilisation. About 
1450 the Canaanites, like all the peoples of the Nearer East, wrote 
in the Babylonian cuneiform character, and in the Babylonian lan- 
guage. This fact, proved by the literature of the time, forces us 
to assume that the influence of Babylonian thought had been ex- 
erted for centuries previously. Of late Canaan itself seems to wish 


BABEL AND BIBLE. £55 


to bear witness. The excavation of an ancient Canaanite castle by 
Professor Sellin has brought to hght an altar with Babylonian 
genii and trees of life, and Babylonian seals.” 

It may be briefly recalled here that the religion of the Cana- 
anites with their god Tammuz, and their Asherahs, bears unmistak- 
able marks of Babylonian influence, and that before the immigration 
of the children of Israel a place in the neighborhood of Jerusalem 
was called 4zt-Minid (house of Ninib), after the Babylonian god 
Ninib. There may have been actually in Jerusalem itself a d7¢ 
WVinib, a temple of the god Ninib. See Ketlinschriftliche Bibliothek, 
NepeNo. 183)'15, and’cf. Zimmern, in the third- edition of Schra- 
der’s Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, second half, p. 411. 
€fealso Lecture I]., p. 184. 


THE SABBATH. 


The vocabulary (II. R. 32, No. 1) mentions, among divers 
kinds of days, a zm nih libbi (1. 16, a, 6), a day for the quieting of 
the heart (viz., of the gods), with its synonym sa-fat-tum, which 
word, in view of the frequent use of the sign faz for dat (e. g., sz- 
tat, var. bat, ‘‘dwelling”; Tig. vi. 94), might be interpreted to 
mean savattum, and on the authority of the syllabary (82, 9-18, 
4159, col. 1, 24) where UD (Sumer. z) is rendered by sa-dat-tum, 
it must be so. 

The statement in the syllabary not only confirms the view that 
the word saéattum means a day, but it may also explain the sadat- 
tum to be the day par excellence, perhaps because it is the day of 
the gods. 

Jensen in Z. A. iv., 1889, pp. 274 et seq. says that sadbattu 
means ‘‘appeasement (of the gods), expiation, penitential prayer,” 
and the verb saddtu ‘‘to conciliate” or ‘‘to be conciliated”’ (Jensen 
in Christliche Welt, col. 492). But, neither from 83, 1-8, 1330, col. 
I, 25, where ZUR is rendered sa-bat-tim (following immediately 
upon zuhhu), nor from IV. 8, where ZZ is rendered by sa-dat-tim 
[why not, as elsewhere, in the nominative?], may Jensen’s propo- 
sition be inferred with any degree of certainty. The verb sadé/u 
is hitherto only attested as asynonym of gamdru(V. R. 28, 14, e, /). 
Therefore, the only meaning that may be justifiably assumed for 
sabattu at present is ‘‘cessation (of work), keeping holiday.” It 
seems to me that the compiler of the syllabary 83, 1-8, 1330, de- 
rived his statement ZUR and 7E=—sadbbatim from the equations 
UD. ZUR and UD. TE =um nuhhi or pussuhi=tm sabattin. 


156 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Accordingly, the Babylonian saéattu is the day of the quieting 
of the heart of the gods and ¢he rest day for human work (the latter 
is naturally the condition of the former). 

If in the well-known calendar of festivals (IV. R. 32/33) the 
seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of a month 
are expressly characterised as days whereon every kind of labor 
should rest, should we not see in these days no other than the sa- 
battu-day ? | 

The mooted words in the calendar of festivals run, according 
to our present knowledge, thus: ‘‘The shepherd of the great na- 
tions shall not eat roasted or smoked (?) meat (variant: anything 
touched by fire), not change his garment, not put on white raiment, 
not offer sacrifice.” [It is doubtful whether these prohibitions are 
of universal application, binding also the flocks of the shepherd. 
Then the particular prohibitions follow]; ‘‘the King shall not 
mount his chariot, as ruler not pronounce judgment; the Magus 
shall not give oracles in a secret place [i. e., removed from pro- 
fane approach], the physician shall not lay his hand on the sick, 
[the day being] unauspiscious for any affair whatever” (? ana kal 
sibuti; stbétu here, it seems used like 123, in Dan. vi. 18; ‘‘afffair, 
Cause; ,)i 

Accordingly we must acquiesce in the fact that the Hebrew 
Sabbath, ultimately is rooted in a Babylonian institution. More 
than this was not claimed. 

We need not quarrel with Kénig who emphasises that the 
Israelite Sabbath received its specific consecration on account of 
its ‘‘humanitarian tendency towards servants, and animals.” 

The setting apart of the seventh day as the day in which we 
are to refrain from labors of any kind finds its explanation, as I 
showed years ago, in the fact that the number seven was in this as 
in other instances to the Babylonians an ‘evil’ number, and this 
is the reason why the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, twenty- 
eighth days in the above-mentioned calendar are called UD. HUL. 
GAL, i. e.5- evil days: 

Alfred Jeremias (1. c., p. 25) aptly recalls the Talmudic story, 
according to which Moses arranged with Pharaoh a day of rest for 
his people, and when asked which he thought the most appropriate 
for the purpose, answered: ‘‘The seventh, dedicated to the Planet 
Saturn, labors done on this day will anyhow not prosper, in any 
case.” 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 157 


THE FALL. 


Any one who reads without bias my comments on the cylinder 
seal (Fig. 47) representing a Babylonian conception of the Fall, 
will grant that in comparing it to the Biblical story of the Fall, 
that I merely proposed to emphasise the circumstance that the 
serpent as the corrupter of the woman was a significant feature in 
either version. The dress of the two Babylonian figures, naturally 
prevented me also from regarding the tree as the tree ‘‘of knowl- 
edge of good and evil.” 

It seems to me that possibly there may loom back of the Bib- 
lical story in Gen. chapters i1.—i11. another older form which knew of 
one tree only in the middle of the garden, the Tree of Life. The 
words in ii. g, ‘‘and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” 
seem to be superadded, and the narrator, quite engrossed with the 
newly introduced tree of knowledge, and forgetful of the tree of 
life inadvertently makes God allow man to eat of the tree of life 
which is in contradiction with iii. 22. 

As to the tree, but that alone, I agree with the late C. P. Tiele 
who sees in the mooted Babylonian picture, ‘‘a god with his male 
or female worshippers partaking of the fruit of the tree of life,” ‘«a 
symbol of the hope of immortality,” and also with Hommel, who 
says (p. 23): ‘‘It is most important that the original tree was ob- 
viously conceived to be a conifer, a pine or cedar with its life and 
procreation promoting fruits. There is, accordingly, an unmistak- 
able allusion to the holy cedar of Eridu, the typical tree of Para- 
dise in the Chaldzan and Babylonian legends.” 

Jensen (col. 488) argues as follows: ‘‘If the picture has any 
reference to the story of the Fall, it is likely to represent a scene 
in which a god forbids the first-created woman to partake of the 
fruit of the tree of life.” 

That one of the figures is distinguished by horns, the usual 
symbol of strength and victory (see Amos vi. 13) in Babylonia as 
well as in Israel, is in my opinion a very ingenious touch on the 
part of the artist, in order to give an unmistakable indication as to 
the sexes of the two clothed human figures. Those who see in the 
serpent behind the woman a ‘‘meandering line” or ‘‘an ornamental 
division,” may do so if they please, but they will find few that will 
concur. 

I do not stand alone with my opinion. Hommel, for instance, 
says (p. 23): ‘‘The woman and the writhing serpent behind her 


158 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


express themselves clearly enough”; and Jensen (col. 488): ‘‘a 
serpent stands or crawls behind the woman.” 

As to the nature of this serpent, nothing definite can be said 
so long as we depend upon this pictorial representation alone. We 
might regard it as one of the forms of Tiamat, who, like Leviathan 
in Job ii. 8, and the old serpent in the Apocalypse, would be as- 
sumed to be still in existence. But this is very uncertain. 

Haupt’s Akkadische und sumerische Keilschrifttexte, p. 119, con- 
tain a bilingual text (D. T. 67) which may deserve a passing notice 
in this connection: It mentions a fallen hand-maid, the ‘‘ mother 
of sin,” who being severely punished, bursts into bitter tears—‘‘in- 
tercourse I learned, kissing I learned’”’—and we find her later on 
lying in the dust stricken by the fatal glance of the deity. 


LIFE AFTER DEATH. 


In the code of Hammurabi (xxvii. 34 et seq.), the sinner is 
cursed in the words: ‘‘May God utterly exterminate him from 
among the living upon earth, and debar his departed soul from the 
fresh water in Hades.” 

The last passage confirms the great antiquity of the Babylonian 
conception concerning the life of the pious after death. 

The Book of Job which shows a close acquaintance with Baby- 
lonian views, describes the contrast in the underworld between a 
hot, waterless desert destined for the wicked, and a garden with 
fresh clear water for the pious. The passage is rendered in a phil- 
ologically unobjectionable translation in my book Das Buch Job, 
Leipzig, 1902: ‘‘Cursed be their portion on earth. Not does he 
turn to vineyards. Desolation and also heat will despoil them. 
Their prayer for snow-water will not be granted. Mercy forgets 
him, vermin devours him; no longer is he remembered.” 

Thus in its right interpretation this passage forms a welcome 
bridge to the New Testament conception of a hot, waterless, and 
torture-inflicting Hell, and the garden which to the Oriental mind 
cannot be conceived of as lacking water, abundant, running, living 
water. 

The concluding verse of the prophetic book of Isaiah (ch. Ixvi. 
24): ‘‘and they shall go forth and look with joy upon the dead 
bodies of those that have revolted from me: how their worm dieth 
not, neither is their fire quenched: and they are an abomination to 
all flesh,” means that those whose bodies are buried in the earth 
will forever be gnawed by worms, and those whose bodies are 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 159 


burnt with fire shall forever suffer the death of fire. In two respects 
the passage is important: first, it shows that cremation is thought 
of as standing entirely on the same level with burial, and that, ac- 
cordingly, not the slightest objection can be made to cremation on 
account of the Bible; secondly, it follows that the words, ‘‘where 
their worm dieth not,” in Mark’s account of the description of hell- 
fire as given by Jesus! should not have been admitted; they are 
out of place. 


TIAMAT. 


Jensen (/. ¢., p. 489) observes with reference to Tidmat: ‘‘Be- 
rossus calls this being ‘a woman,’ she is the mother of the gods,’ 
has a husband and a lover, and nowhere throughout Assyrian or 
Babylonian literature is there found even the slightest hint that 
this creature is regarded otherwise than as a woman.”’ 

Nothing can be farther off the mark than this assertion, which 
contradicts not merely me, but also a fact recognised by all Assyri- 
ologists. Or is it not true that a human woman gives birth to 
human beings, while a lioness brings forth young lions? Therefore, 
a creature which gives birth to szrmahhé, i. e., gigantic serpents 
(zttalad, see Creation-epic, III., 24 and passim), must itself be a 
great, powerful serpent, a dpaxwv peyas or some serpent-like mon- 
ster. Asa matter of fact, Tiamat is represented in Babylonian art 
as a great serpent. (See, e. g., Cheyne’s English translation of 
the Book of the Prophet Isaiah in Haupt’s edition of the Bible, p. 
206. ) 

I see by no means in the scene reproduced in my First Lec- 
ture (Fig. 46, p. 46) an exact portrayal of Marduk’s fight with the 
Dragon, as described to us in the creation-epic; on the contrary, I 
speak expressly and cautiously of a battle between ‘‘the power of 
light and the power of darkness” in general. 

The representation of this battle, especially of the monster 
Tiamat, naturally left a wide scope to the imagination of the artist. 
A dragon could be represented in various ways, such as we see in 
Figure 44, page 44. The beast which lies at the feet of the god 
Marduk has since been palpably proved by the German excavations 
to be, as explained by me, the dragon Tiamat. The relief of the 
sirrussé found on the Gate of Ishtar at Babylon unmistakably 
agrees with the figure familiar to us from our illustration. 

Oettli, following Gunkel (Schépfung und Chaos, pp. 29-114), 


1Mk. ix. 44, 46, 48. 


160 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


practically agrees with my conclusion when he says: ‘‘There are 
enough references in the prophetical and poetical books of the Oid 
Testament to make it obvious that the old [Babylonian] creation- 
myth survived in the popular conceptions of Israel, and that ina 
highly-colored form.” And again: ‘‘There are indeed enough 
cases where the original mythical meaning of the monsters Zehém, 
Leviathan, Tannin, Rahab, is unmistakable.”! Isaiah proceeds (li. 
10): ‘*Art thou not it that dried up the sea, the water of the great 
Tehoém, that made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to 
pass over?”? Here the prophet actually couples ‘‘those mythical 
reminiscences” with the deliverance from Egypt, as another tri- 
umph of Yahveh over the waters of Tehom. And when we con- 
sider how in other passages (e. g., Ps. cvi. g-11, Ixxvill. 13) Yah- 
veh’s achievement of the passage of the children of Israel through 
the Red Sea is described and celebrated, we cannot apply to any 
but primeval times the words in Ps. Ixxiv. 13 sg.: ‘‘Thou brakest 
the heads-of the dragons in the waters, thou didst dash to pieces 
the heads of the sea-monsters” (Leviathan). Leviathdn, according 
to Job ii. 8 also, is a personification of the dark chaotic primeval 
waters, the sworn enemy of light. 

Even Konig reluctantly grants (p. 27) that the Book of Job? 
‘alludes, in all probability, to the conquest of the primeval ocean ;” 
Jensen accordingly seems to stand quite alone when he says (Z. ¢., 
Pp. 490): 

‘‘ Wherever the Old Testament mentions a struggle of Yahveh against serpents 
and crocodile-like creatures, there is no occasion to assume with Delitzsch and 
with a goodly number of other Assyriologists [add: also with Gunkel and most 
Old Testament theologians] a reference to the Babylonian myth of the struggle 
with Tiamat.” 

Oettli is right when he declares (p. 17): 

‘*To submit the researches of Natural Science to the Biblical version of the 
creation is a wholly erroneous proceeding, which is the more unintelligible as the 
details of the second account of Genesis and many other passages in the Old Testa- 
ment are quite incompatible with the first. Let us, therefore, unreservedly give to 
Science that which belongs to Science.” 


Oettli proceeds: 


“But let us also give to God that which is God's; the world is a creation of 
God's omnipotence, which supports it as its law of life,—this the first page of Gen- 
esis tells us.” 

1Oettli cites Job ix. 13 and Isaiah li. 9, where. moreover, ‘‘pierced’’ might be better than 
dishonored.” 


2‘*God turns not his anger, the helpers of x@44 brake in pieces under him’? (ix. 13). and 
in his power he smote the sea and in his wisdom he dashed 7@h4é to pieces”’ (xxvi. 12). 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 16% 


In this I can no longer concur. Our faith claims, and many 
passages in the Old Testament assert, that God is the Almighty 
Creator of heaven and earth, but this truth is certainly not stated on 
the first page of Genesis, where we read: ‘‘In the beginning God 
created the heaven and the earth,—and the earth was waste and 
desolate,” etc.; for this passage leaves unanswered the question, 
‘«Whence did chaos originate?” Besides, even among the Baby- 
lonians the creation of the heavens and of the earth is ascribed to 
the gods, and the life of all animate creatures is regarded as rest- 
ing in their hands. 

* : x 

I will call attention to a passage in II. R. 51, 44a, where a 
canal is named after ‘‘the Serpent-god who bursts (or destroys) 
the house of life,” apparently referring to some as yet unknown 
Babylonian myth. This, however, would upset Jensen’s view, that 
we may perhaps see in the two figures, two gods dwelling by the 
tree of life, and in the serpent, its guardian. 

Zimmern! regards the serpent-god as ultimately identical with 
the chaos-monster. 

ANGELS. 


Cornill (7. ¢c., p. 1682), also, comes to the conclusion that ‘the 
conception of angels is genuinely Babylonian.” When I spoke of 
guardian angels who attend on men (Ps. xci. 11 et seq., Matt. 
xviii. 10), I had in mind such passages as Apla’s well-known letter 
of consolation to the queen-mother (K. 523). The Babylonian 
officer writes: ‘‘Mother of the king, my lady, be comforted (?) ! 
Bel’s and Nebo’s angel of mercy attends on the king of the lands, 
my lord.” Further the writing addressed to Esarhaddon (K. 948): 
««May the great gods send a guardian of salvation and life to stand 
by the king, my lord;”’ and also the words of Nabopolassar, the 
founder of the Chaldean kingdom: ‘‘To lordship over land and 
people Marduk called me. He sent a Cherub of mercy (a tutelary 
god) to attend on me, and everything I undertook he sped” (see 
Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Geselischaft, No. 10, p. 14 et seq. ). 

In ‘‘the Old Serpent which is the Devil and Satan” is pre- 
served the ancient Babylonian conception of Tiamat, the primeval 
enemy of the gods, while Satan, who appears several times in the 
later and latest books of the Old Testament, and is always the 
enemy of man, not of God,? owes his origin to Babylonian demon- 

1 Die Keitlinschriften und das Alte Testament, 3rd ed., second half, p. 504 et seq. 


2See Job, ch. i. et seq., 1 Chron. xxi. 1, Zech. iii. 1 et seq. 


162 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


ology in which we become acquainted with an z/u dimnu or ‘evil 
god’ and a ga//é or ‘devil.’ 


BABYLONIAN SUPERSTITIONS IN SWEDEN. 


How much Assyria intrudes into our own time can be seen 
from G. Hellmann’s most interesting communion on the Chaldzan 
origin of modern superstitions about the understorms (in the JZe- 
teorologische Zeitschrift, June, 1896, pp. 236-238), where it is proved 
that an ancient Babylonian belief survives even at the present day 
in the popular Swedish book, Sroyl/ae Prophetia, in which a chapter 
entitled ‘‘Tordéns marketecken”’ treats of the prognostics of the 
weather and fertility as indicated by the thunder in the several 
months. 

CANAANITES. 


The term used by me in its usual linguistic sense (see, e. g., 
Kautzsch, Hebréische Grammatik, 27th ed., p. 2), has been replaced 
in later editions by ‘‘ North Semites,” simply because the name was 
frequently misunderstood. ‘That the kings of the first Babylonian 
dynasty, Swmu-abi and his successors, do not belong to that Semitic 
stock of Babylonian Semites who had become fused with the Sume- 
rians, but rather to later immigrants, is proved by the ancient Baby- 
lonian scholars, for they deemed the names of the two kings Ham- 
murabi (also Ammurabi) and Ammisadiga (or Ammizadiga) to be 
foreign and stand in need of explanation, rendering the former by 
Kimta-rapastum, ‘wide-spread family” (cf. 82309, Rehoboam), and 
the latter by Aimtum-kéttum, ‘upright family” (VR. 44, 21, 22, a, 
6). The replacement of the y (in 82, people, family) by 2 in the 
name Hammurabi shows that these Semites, unlike the older stock 
that had been settled for centuries in Babylonia, still pronounced 
the yas an y. Further, their pronunciation of sf as an s,! no less 
than the preformative of the third person of the perfect tense with za 
(not 27), proves that these Semitic tribes were quite distinct, which 
fact, first stated by Hommel and Winckler, is and remains true, in 
spite of Jensen’s opposition (/ ¢., p. 491). Linguistic and his- 

af torical considerations make it more than probable thatthese im- 
migrant Semites belonged to the Northern Semites and are most 
closely affliated with the linguistically so-called ‘‘Canaanites” (i. 
e., the Phoenicians, Moabites, Hebrews, etc.). The knowledge of 


1lSamsu in Sa-am-su-iliina (cf. also Samu-abz) as contrasted with the older Babylonian 
Shamshu, 


2In the personal names of that age Vawlik-ilu, Varbi-ilu, Vak-bani-tlu, etc 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 163 


this we owe to the acumen of Hugo Winckler (see his Geschichte 
Israels), who thereby made a particularly important addition to his 
many other merits. The za of ¢éna (in Samsu tlina), which is 
alleged to mean ‘‘our God,” is not sufficient to prove tribal rela- 
tionship with Arabia, since, in view of the names Ammi-zadiga, 
Ammi-ditana, it is at least equally probable that z/na represents an 
adjective.! However, zadig, ‘‘righteous,”’ may indicate a ‘‘Cana- 
anite”’ dialect, both lexically? and phonetically;? and the same may 
be said, too, of such personal names as Va-sz-ub-i/u belonging to 
the same age.* Will Jensen be able ever to produce an unobjec- 
tionable explanation from the Babylonian language of such names 
as Vasiéb-ilu? 

1Note the personal name /-/#-ma in Meissner’s Bettrige zum altbabylonischen Privatrecht, 
No. 4; cf: JON ? 


2Zadig must be the Hebrew Py: for the verbal stem, compare sadu&, ‘‘he is righteous,”’ 
. - 
in the Amarna tablets. 


3 The vowel @ is obscured to 6, #; e. g., in amfké, signifying the pronoun ‘’I”’ in the Amarna 
tablets, etc. 


4Cf. Phoen. Ba-‘a-al-ta-sti-bu, VR, 2, 8+. 


REPLY. TO CRITICS OF THE: SECONDS Ee 
TORE? 


That a discussion of these momentous theological or religio- 
historical questions, if they are but treated in the right spirit, 
could be considered an injury or even an insult to Judaism, least of 
all to the modern Jewish faith, is in my opinion absolutely ex- 
cluded. Dispassionate, strictly objective inquiry into the origin 
of the Sabbath, of the position of woman in Israel as well as in 
Babylonia, and of kindred questions, can only sharpen our judg- 
ment and promote the truth. In the same way we shall gradually 
witness in Jewish circles a unanimity regarding the worth of Old 
Testament monotheism, which at present is not yet attained. In 
contradiction to the universalism of the belief in God which several 
Jewish writers of open letters assume to prevail in the Old Testa- 
ment (and they imagine they prove their case by quotations of Scrip- 
tural passages), the opinion of other Israelites, authorities both for 
their general knowledge and Biblical scholarship, has been voiced, 
the purport of which appears in the following private letter of Jan- 
uary 14, 1903: 

‘‘Trrefutable is your assertion that Jewish monotheism is egotistic, particular- 
stic, and exclusive ; equally irrefutable, however, in my opinion, is the fact that 
this rigorously particularistic monotheism alone could preserve Judaism for thou- 
sands of years in the midst of all kinds of persecution and hostility. From the 
Jewish standpoint, the national theism is brilliantly justified; to give it up means 
to give up Judaism; and though much can be said in favor of such a surrender, 
there are many points that militate against it.” 

The divine character of the Torah, of course, will have to be 
excluded from scientific discussion, at least so long as a complete 
neglect of the results of Pentateuch-criticism on the Jewish side 
can be regarded as ‘‘exact science,” and so long as reviews of 
Babel and Bible based on such a neglect are looked upon as ‘‘scien- 
tific criticism.” 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 165 


A deep pain seizes me, who myself am sprung from a strictly 
orthodox Lutheran house, when I consider the abyss of obscurant- 
ism, confusion, halfheartedness, contradiction, let alone worse fea- 
tures, of the evangelical orthodoxy displayed towards the questions 
raised by Babel and Bible. From all quarters and corners the cry is 
raised that I have said ‘‘ nothing essentially new”: but, if that be 
so, why this extraordinary excitement? 

On the one hand, a deep lamentation and bitter accusation of 
Assyriology comes from Aix-la-Chapelle, because the Old Testa- 
ment traditions, e. g., Nebuchadnezzar’s madness, are arbitrarily 
assumed to be borrowed from Babylonian myths; on the other 
hand, an ‘‘orthodox pastor” exclaims in the columns of a journal 
of central Germany that I am fighting windmills, because the story 
of Balaam’s ass, of the sun standing still, of the fall of the walls of 
Jericho, of the fish which swallows Jonah, of Nebuchadnezzar’s 
madness, are not contained in the historical books of the Bible. 
‘¢They are accounts,” he says, ‘‘whose historical trustworthiness 
may be contested even according to orthodox views.” 

Accordingly even evangelical orthodoxy set aside ‘‘revela- 
tions”? which are no longer deemed in accord with the spirit of the 
age: will not the orthodoxy once for all condescend to an open 
confession, and explain unequivocally which books and narratives 
of «‘Holfy Scripture” they think proper to surrender? 

Professor Ernst Sellin of Vienna, one of the first and most 
ineritorious among the positive Old Testament investigators, gladly 
acknowledges in his glosses on Babel and Bible (Neue Frete Presse, 
january 25, 1903) ‘‘the innumerable helps, elucidations, and cor- 
rections which in grammatical and lexicographical questions as 
well as in the field of the history of civilisation and general history 
Old Testament investigation owes to the decipherment of the Baby- 
lonian inscriptions. Yet, on the other//he is of opinion that if I 
dispose of the fact of a divine revelation in the Bible on account 
of the Songs of Songs and the amalgamation of tradition out of 
heterogeneous sources, I appear on the scene a hundred years too 
late. This is, to say the least, a gross exaggeration. When my 
dear father, Franz Delitzsch, towards the end of his life, found 
himself compelled by the weight of the facts of the Old Testament 
text criticism to make some, and indeed the smallest possible, con- 
cessions for the book of Genesis, he was persecuted, even on his 
deathbed (1890), by the denunciation of whole synods. And the 
great commotion excited by my Second Lecture serves to show 


v han 


1903 


166 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


convincingly enough that the circles which govern Church and 
school cherish a different conviction from that of my highly- 
esteemed critic. 

The several clergymen who have not wasted their time at the 
university adhere to freer views, but Church and School—especially 
the public schools—have remained unaffected, and this inconsist- 
ency is no longer endurable, as stated in my First Lecture and also 
freely granted by Harnack. 

And this inconsistency produces an increasingly widening gulf. 
When, e. g., a theologian of no less authority writes (26th January, 


4993): ‘*You criticise a conception of Revelation that sensible 
Protestants no longer share; it is that of the antiquated Lutheran 
Dogmatists. . . . All divine revelation is, of course, affected by the 


human medium, and must therefore have historically developed; ” 
he describes exactly the standpoint that I myself advocate, only I 
regard the conceptions of ‘‘divine revelation” as held by the Church 
and as a historical, 1. e., human, development to be irreconcilable 
contradictions. Either we take the one or the other. TZertium non 
datur. 

I hold the view that in the Old Testament we have to deal 
with a development effected or permitted by God like any other 
product of this world, but, for the rest, of a purely human and his- 
torical character, in which God has not intervened through a ‘‘spe- 
cial, supernatural revelation.”’ 

The Old Testament monotheism plainly shows itself to be 
such a process marked by an advance from the imperfect to the 
perfect, from the false to the true, here and there indeed by occa- 
sional retrogression. The modification of the original conception 
of revelation, deeply rooted in ancient Orientalism, by a surrender 
of the verbal inspiration, made by both, evangelical and Catholic 
theology, and even by the Church, irretrievably divests the Old 
Testament of its character as the ‘‘ Word of God,” ushering in, as 
it seems to me, the end of the theological and the beginning of the 
religio-historical treatment of the Old Testament. 

The present resurrection of the Babylonio-Assyrian literature 
has certainly not been accomplished without God’s will. It has 
suddenly taken its place by the side of the ancient Hebrew litera- 
ture, the only one of Hither-Asia heretofore known to us, and com- 
pels to revise our conception of revelation bound up with the Old 
Testament. Would that we might more and more become con-_ 
vinced that only by a dispassionate reinvestigation of the docu- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 167 


ments we can reach our aim, and that in this controversy, neither 

now nor when its solution has been approached, our piety and the 
: ° ” 

communion of our hearts with God can suffer the least. 


CONCLUSION. 


I shall endeavor to reply only to scientific criticisms, but I fear 
that, if I adhere to this maxim, I shall have little opportunity, if 
matters continue as heretofore, to concern myself with Evangelical 
Orthodoxy. Their method of warfare, especially that of the Evan- 
gelical Orthodox Press, fills me with profound disgust. In the 
Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, founded by the venerable Hengsten- 
burg, Pastor P. Wolff, of Friedensdorf, Seelow, one of its regular 
contributors, writes (No. 4, January 25, 1903) as follows: 

‘‘Judging from the proofs given by Delitzsch, we must expect him in his next 
Lecture to point out, how much lower the views of Christianity regarding marriage 
are than those of the Babylonians by a reference to the elopment of the Saxon 


Crown-Princess. No Babylonian princess ever ran away with the tutor of her 
children.” 


And again: 


‘‘Delitzsch intends to deliver another lecture on Babylon and the New Testa- 
ment; perhaps he will also treat the subject ‘Babel and Berlin’: and therein will 
discover many points of contact. A small contribution I could offer myself. By 
the latest discoveries it has been proved that even the Prussian decorations are de- 
rived from Babylon. On a monolith preserved in the British Museum, King Samsi- 
Ramman IV., is represented wearing upon his breast, on a ribbon round the neck, 
a cross, which appears to be exactly like a modern cross such as is used for orders 
What a new light is shed by this last discovery upon our comprehension of the 
real meaning of orders! Even in Babylon the order of the Red Eagle of the 
fourth class was already bestowed! Since our orders are unquestionably derived 
from Babel, it is evident that our modern civilisation is steeped through and 
through with Babylonian ideas.” 


What a slough of mental and moral depravity in a German 
clergyman these words bespeak! And samples like this could be 
multiplied tenfold! 

In contrast to this, I, as an Evangelical Christian, greet with 
gratitude Rev. Dr. Friedrich Jeremias of Dresden, whose discus- 
sion of my lecture (Dresdner Journal, February 4, 1903), though 
according to his standpoint he naturally rejects my position, is 
truly noble both in diction and substance. 

A third lecture on ‘‘Babel and Bible” will be delivered as 
as soon as the views on these two lectures shall have become clear 
and settled. 





THIRD AND LAST LECTURE 


+ 





THIRD AND LAST LECTURE. 


I. 


NCE again let me point out how the restoration of 

Babylonian and Assyrian antiquity is broadening 

our spiritual insight, how, together with the achievements 

of Old Testament research, it is radically changing our 

judgment in regard to the essential value of ancient He- 

brew literature, and how it seems destined to shed light 
upon the most vital religious questions. 

The horizon of the tribal genealogy of Genesis x (the 
so-called Volkertafel) only extended as far as the Persian 
Gulf, and its geography and ethnology corresponded to 
the limited knowledge ofabout the seventh century before 
Christ, yet no one would hold it responsible for its many 
errors and omissions. In the second verse Japheth’s oldest 
son is given as Gomer (mentioned also in Ezekiel xxxviii, 
6), and the third as Madai. While the Indo-Germanic 
Medes (Madai) first come within the horizon even of the 
Assyrians in the time of Sargon (722-705 B. C.), this is 
not the case with Gimir (Gomer) until Asarhaddon’s time 
(681-668 B. C.)’ The Sapardeans were the inhabitants 
of the land Saparda-u which is named in the inscriptions 
of King Darius together with Cappadocia and Ionia and 


1See my paper Wo lag das Paradies? p. 245 f. Leipsic, 1881. 


172 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


was probably also in Asia Minor; and these people appear 
on the clay tablets (Sm. 2005, K. 4668 and others) to- 
gether with the Girmirrzeans, Medes, and Mannzans as 
enemies of Asarhaddon. Thus a little light falls on the 
land Sepharad mentioned by the prophet Obadiah (i. 20) 
to which the people of Jerusalem were taken as captives 
probably by Ionian merchants or pirates. 

To rightly appreciate the actual facts, we must take 





Fig. 82. SItLvER VASE OF Fig. 83. Bronze Ox Heap. 


ENTEMENA. Original in the Royal Museum at Berlin. 
Original in the Louvre. 


into account that it was a Hebrew author who gave Shem 
the rank of first born of the father of post-diluvian human- 
ity. But we may not always persist in slavish dependence 
upon such a shortsighted representation of the history of 
civilisation which is constantly fettered by Semitic preju- 
dices; but rather must we be thankful for the enormous 
expansion of our knowledge that has been brought about 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 173 


by excavations in Babylonia and Assyria, in the realm of 
the earliest history of mankind. The Old Testament 
writers had no presentiment of those people, for instance, 
who preceded the later Indo-Germanic Medes (the descen- 
dants of Japheth) or the Semites in Mesopotamia. The 
genealogy in Genesis takes no note of the non-Semitic 
Elamites whose dominion extended for a time over Baby- 
lon as far as Canaan in the third millennium before Christ, 
and the inexhaustible plenitude of whose power set limits 
even to the victorious Assyrian columns. 

Even the Sumerian nation disappeared completely 
from the remembrance of the writers of the Old Testament 
as well as of Greek authors, although by a curious chance 
Abraham’s home, Ur of the Chaldees, bears a Sumerian 
name, and the temple (écha/) on Zion as well as David's 
throne (&zssé) are called by foreign names borrowed from 
the Sumerian language. Ur (Hebrew, Ur-Kashdim') 
is the Sumero-Babylonian Uru, originally Urum, 1. e., 


‘‘city,’’ so called as a ‘‘place of refuge.’ The Hebrew 


992 93 


words for ‘‘temple,’’? and ‘‘throne’’’ are borrowed like the 
corresponding Babylonian-Assyrian words ¢éka//uw and 
kusst, from the Sumerian é-ga/, i. e., “large house,’’ and 
guza. | 

Ever clearer and more tangible appears before our 
eyes this small but highly talented nation whose people 
shared the religious beliefs of the Semitic Babylonians 
and more or less influenced the Canaanite tribes; this 
nation of pioneers in everything which makes for the re- 
fining, ennobling and beautifying of life. Their workings 


in silver of the third or even the fourth millennium before 


1D YD TN 222" BND 


174 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Christ, like the magnificent silver vase of the royal priest 
Entemena, arouse our admiration; or bronzes like those 
splendidly molded oxen heads with eyes of lapis lazuli. 
Their diorite sculptures, like that of the architect with 
his construction plans upon his knees, are not so very 





Fig. 84. SitTTiInG STATUE OF GUDEA. 


inferior to the ideal that must have been present in the 
mind of the Sumerian artist. 

When we observe these heads of Sumerian men and 
women in whose finely cut features the ennobling influ- 
ence of hard work is clearly evident, and realise that the 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 175 


culture of these people not only founded that of the Semitic 
Babylonians, but is still operative in our own in matters 
of no inconsiderable importance, then we feel justified in 
the hope that the form of which instruction in the earliest 
history of mankind has availed itself, will in the future 
be made to conform to the advance of science, even if the 
old form, Shem, Ham and Japheth must be abandoned. 





Fig. 85. KESTORATION OF THE SUMERIAN ARCHITECT. ! 


Only two kings of the few rulers of the kingdom of 
Chaldzea which Nabopolassar had founded, held any in- 
terest for the people of Judea: Nebuchadnezzar who led 
the Jewish nation into captivity, but by the vastness of 
his dominion compelled veneration and awe even from his 
enemies, and the last minor king Nabuna’id in whose 


1 The restitution en nature of the statue of ‘‘The Architect’? is due to Léon 
Heuzey and may be found in plate XI of Heuzey's Orzgines ortentales de l'art; 
recuetl demémotres archéologiques et de monuments figurés, ire partie, Paris, 1891. 
Heuzey observes in regard to this photograph of his model, ‘‘Thus we can account 
for the arrangement of the showdda or Indian woolen shawl which I have used in 
restoring the fringed shawls of the statues of Gudea.” 


176 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


reign Babylon fell into the hands of Persian Cyrus, the 
redeemer of Judah’s captivity. And as their recollection 
became less vivid, Nabuna’id was replaced in the minds 





Fig. 86. Heraps oF SUMERIAN MEN. 


Originals in Paris and Berlin. 


of the people by his son Belshazzar, the leader of the 
Chaldzean army in the war against Persia, who in turn 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 177 


was wrongfully called the son of Chaldza’s greatest king, 
Nebuchadnezzar. 
Thanks to excavations, however, we are now correctly 





Fig. 87. HEaps oF SUMERIAN WOMEN. 


Originals in Paris and Berlin. 


informed about all these matters without casting any 
special reflections upon the Book of Daniel, a production 


178 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


of the second century before Christ. Much rather are we 
grateful to the author that whatever liberties he has other- 
wise taken withthe history and interpretation of the words 
mené nené tekél t-pharsin, he has nevertheless given us 
the key to their correct explanation. For, as the French 
archeologist Clermont-Ganneau has recognised, the con- 
trast so impressively depicted in the fifth chapter of the 
Book of Daniel between the great father Nebuchadnezzar 
and his exceedingly inferior son under whom the Persians 
had seized the kingdom, betrays in connection with the 
once possible meaning of the words, ‘‘There has been 
numbered a mzue, a sekel and a half mzne,’’ that this fa- 
miliar saying had its origin in Jewish circles where the 
insignificant son of a great man used to be figuratively 


( 


designated as ‘‘se#e/, son of a mzne’’ and vice versa. To 


this epithet then the word play between jarsiz, ‘‘half- 


y ) 


mine,’’ and ‘‘Persian’’ was easily adapted. This spirited, 


somewhat sarcastic box mot comprehensively sums up the 
entire Chaldean history in the words, a mzve, 1. e.,a great 
king; a sekel, i. e.,aworthless prince: and half mzve, i. e., 
the division of the realm between the Medes and the 
Persians.’ 

We need no longer discuss the identity of the Assyr- 
ian king, Pul, who reigned in the days of Menahem of 
Israel (2 Kings, xv. 19) with the Assyrian king Tiglath- 
pileser, the contemporary of Pekah (verse 29). The 


1 Of the large number of treatises written on the words mné mné tkél t-phar- 
stn, the following are worthy of especial mention: Clermont-Ganneau in the 
Fournal asiatique, Série VIII, 1 (1886), p. 36 ff.; Th, Nédldeke, ‘‘Mene tekel 
upharsin” in the Zeztschrift fiir Assyriologie (ZA) 1, 1866, p. 414-418. Georg 
Hoffmann, ‘‘Mene, mene tekel upharsin,"’ 2bid., II, 1887, pp. 45-48; but above all 
others Paul Haupt in Johns Hopkins University Circular, No. 58, p. 104. — Cf. 
also zb¢d. No. 98, May, 1892, John Dyneley Prince, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, 
Upharsin." 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 179 


question at issue has long been settled, and was forever 
done away with by the discovery of two more cuneiform 
chronologies. I refer to the list of Babylonian kings in 
which Poros is written Pu /« (Hebrew Pu/'); and the 
Babylonian chronicle, which, although copied from a Baby- 
lonian original for a Babylonian, inserts instead of Pudlu 
the Assyrian name of this king 7ukultt-aptl-éshara. In- 
cidentally we notice the play of chance, that just as in the 
Hebrew record (1 Chron. v. 6, 26; 2 Chron. xxviii. 20) 
the name of this Assyrian king is wrongly written Tig- 
lathpilzeser, so in the Babylonian Chronicle (I. 23) it is 
incorrectly written Tukul-ti-apil-zza-éshar-ra. This error 
is accounted for by the zza Bébzl which immediately 
follows. 

A bas relief in the palace of Nimrudrepresents him as 


standing vividly before us on his war-chariot, the renowned 
Pul or Tiglathpileser III, whose protection Menahem 


purchased for one thousand talents of silver, but who after- 
wards threw in the face of Assyria, the whole of Galilee 
_ with its neighboring territory and led away the inhabitants 
captive. Thus was furnished occasion for that amalgama- 
tion of Galileans and Samaritans which sprang into ex- 
istence in the eighth and seventh centuries before Christ, 
by transplanting on that soil foreign nationalities at whose 
head were. citizens from the Babylonian towns, Babel, 
Kutha, and Erech. According to 2 Kings xvii, 24, the 
king of Assyria (Sargon is meant) placed people from 
Babylon, Kutha,’? Ava, Hamath and Sepharvaim in the 
cities of Samaria; so also Ezra iv. 9 records where the 
inhabitants of Erech and Babylon are likewise named 


1595 * For Kutha see pp. 72 and 73. 


180 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


among those nationalities transplanted by Asnappar 
(Asurbanipal) to Samaria and other lands across the 
Euphrates, together with the Susianians, i. e. Elamites. 

The underlying current of this mixed race was Baby- 
lonian and remained so to such a degree that the Talmud 
in countless passages calls the Samaritans Kuthzeans 
directly after the Babylonian city Kutha, and that the 
Galilean dialect with its peculiarly Babylonian slurring 





Fig. 88. THe Assyrian K1InG Put (TIGLATHPILESER II!). 


of gutturals betrayed the Galilean even in Jesus’ time 
(Matt. xxvi. 73). To illustrate this, compare the familiar 
passage of the Talmud (-ruézn 53 b.): ‘When the 
Galilean said, ‘Who has an amar'?’ they answered him, 
‘Thou foolish Galilean, meanest thou an ass (hamér )? to 
ride, wine (amar )* to drink, or wool (‘amar )* for clothing, 
or a lamb (’zmmar)> to slay?’’’ Gutturals were for the 
most part similarly reduced to a sfzrztus lenzs in the Bab- 
ylonian language. The Israelites regarded the Babylo- 


LON Tn | En GYM 44D Gis SDN 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 181 


nians as so little Semitic that the author of the ethnolog- 
ical lists in Genesis did not include them at all in his 
enumeration of the ‘‘Sons of Shem.’’ The establishment 
of the Babylonian character (which from this very fact, 
therefore, was not purely Semitic) of the mixed race of 
the Samaritans and Galileans might prove worthy of 
consideration, it seems to me, in the New Testament in- 
vestigations of the future. 

Many of the sayings, ideas, and actions of the Gali- 
lean Jesus unconsciously compel Babylonian comparisons, 
as, for instance, there might prove to be an intrinsic con- 
nection between the Babylonianism ‘‘Son of Man,’’ by 
which term Ezekiel was usually addressed by Yahveh; 
and the use of exactly the same expression in the mouth 
of Jesus. It no longerrequires explanation that in Aramaic 
usage as well as in the Babylonian, ‘‘son of man”’ is a 
circumlocution for ‘‘man’’ (children of men=men) and 
that Dan. vii. 13 (where with reference to the coming 
Messiah it is said one like the ‘‘son of man’’ came with 
the clouds) is to be understood as ‘‘there came a being in 


human form.’’ 


As regards Yahveh’s constant mode of 
addressing the prophet Ezekiel as son of man (ben adam) ,* 
which is found elsewhere only in Dan. vii. 17, it seems 
to me we must accept it as a Babylonianism like others 
in the book of Ezekiel. Smendin Der Prophet Ezechiel’ 
considers that the prophet is thus addressed as one ‘‘who 
in relation to the majesty of God feels himself simply as 
an accidentally chosen individual of his wretched race (Ps. 
viii. 5; Job xxv. 6) and not as a particular personality 


(cf. Amos vii. 8; viii. 2; Jer. i, 11)’’; and on that account 
= tn 2 Second ed., p. 17. Leipsic: 1880. 


182 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Luther translates it ‘‘child of man’’ to be more exact. But 
why were none of the other prophets addressed by Yahveh 
as ‘‘son of man’’ or ‘‘child of man’’? If the Ezekiel mode 
of address is only a Babylonianism, then the epithet ‘‘son 
of man’’ might prove to be simply a substitute for the 


¢ 


personal name. For the Babylonian mér avilim, ‘‘son 


of man,’’ or ‘‘child of man’”’ is only a circumlocution for 


’ and is interchangeable with 


the simple avi/um, ‘‘man,’ 
it, for instance, in the Code of Hammurabi; but with the 
Babylonian ‘‘son of man’’ (and consequently also with 
the simple ‘‘man’’) there is always connected the idea of 
a certain dignity. For in contrast to a slave whose name 
never received the added ‘‘son of such and such,’’ and in 
contrast to a person of obscure parentage who was called 
‘son of nobody’’ (mdr la maman), the idea of the free 
man, the nobleman, was closely connected with the term 


? For this very reason the Babylonian ‘‘son 


‘son of man. 
of man’’ made a very suitable substitute for a personal 
name, just as old Babylonian letters bear in place of the 
individual name of the addressee, the words ‘‘Speak to 
the man whom Marduk will endow with life’’ (axa avilim 
sha Marduk uballatshu)." 

It surely seems as if it would be an easy matter to 
prove a close connection between this Babylonianism as 
used in the accounts of the prophets and the same ex- 
pression spoken by Jesus. On the other hand it may be 
well to add just here that a far more important Biblical 
usage is now at last conclusively cleared up, and indeed 
in a way that no Old Testament exegetist ever dreamed 
of. The old Babylonian law documents, like the Code of 


1 See VATh 793. Bu.88, 5-12, 207. Bu. 91, 5-9, 354- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 183 


Hammurabi, bring to light certain short formulas by 
means of which definite expressed wishes receive irrevo- 
cable legal authority. If the father or mother says to a 
child ‘‘You are not my child,’’ (#/ mdéri atta), then by 
that statement he is repudiated and cast out from house 
and home. And as achild was legally adopted in Babylonia 
by pronouncing the words ‘‘You are my son,’’ so the 
psalmist in that familiar seventh verse of the second psalm 
explains the Messiah allegorically as Yahveh’s adopted 
son and heir of the nations until the end of the world by 
Yahveh’s own inviolable decree, ‘‘’Thou art my son: this 
day have I begotten thee.’’ 

It is interesting in this connection to compare the 
Code of Hammurabi, Sec. 170: ‘‘When a man’s wife bears 
him children and his slave bears him children, and during 
his lifetime he says to the children which the slave bore 
him ‘my children’ (mdréa) they are included with the 
children of the wife. After the father’s death the property 
will be divided equally among the wife’s children and 
those of the slave, but the son of the wife will have the 
first choice of the portions.’’ It is similarly stated in 
Sec. 171. We read further in Sec. 192: ‘‘If a child says 
to his foster father or mother, ‘You are not my father,— 
You are not my mother,’ his tongue shall be cut out.’”’ 

Indeed, the reawakening of the Assyrio-Babylonian 
antiquity proves to be especially significant for the Old 
Testament psalter, that hymn book of post-exilic Israel. 
Of course I do not refer here to the minor consideration 

1 For these short juridical formulas see Kohler-Peiser, Hammurabis Gesetz 
(Vol. I, Leipsic, 1904, p. 123, note 1)—where reference is made (and with reason) 


to Hosea i. 9, ‘‘Ye are not my people,” and Psalms lxxxix. 27, ‘‘Also I will make 
him my first born.” 


184 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


that the many musical instruments mentioned in the Old 
Testament and particularly in the psalms, such as harp, 





Fig. 89. MusIcIANS. 


Relief from Sendschirli in Northern Syria. 





Fig. 90. AssyRIAN PROCESSION OF MUSICIANS. 


From the time of Asurbanipal. 


zither, cymbals, and timbrels, are now found to be repre- 
sented on Assyrian monuments, although, because of the 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 185 


near relationship of the Israelites with the Babylonians 
and Assyrians, the Assyrian reliefs may well bespeak our 
interest above all others. By others, I mean those repre- 













Shen : 
[po 
Zz 


UN 


COMMA 





——Se ee 
inapnieavesannasat an 
Pasa Apr 





Fig. gt. ASSYRIAN Harp AND ZITHER Fig. 92. ASSYRIAN QUARTET. 


PLAYERS. 





Fig. 93. ASSYRIAN HARP AND FLUTE PLAYERS. 


sentations which furnish valuable illustrations to the 
Hebrew or Syrian musical instruments as, for instance, 
the relief brought to light by German excavations in Send- 
schirli under the leadership of Felix von Luschans and 


186 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


which is now preserved in the Museum of Constantinople. 
Indeed, when we observe more closely this long triumphal 
procession of singing and playing musicians, men, women 
and children, and perhaps single out the first lute players 
and place by their side analogous pictures of harp and 
zither players, reliefs of the ninth and seventh centuries 
before Christ; perhaps add, too, this quartet which repre- 
sents both cymbals and timbrels, connoisseurs would then 
be sufficiently informed in regard to the construction and 





Fig. 94. ANCIENT BABYLONIAN Harp OF ELEVEN STRINGS. 


manner of playing on those old stringed instruments. It 
is interesting to be able to place by the side of the ten- 
stringed harp so often mentioned in the Old Testament 
psalms an eleven-stringed harp represented in a primi- 
tive Babylonian relief. 

But of far greater importance is the fact that in the 
Assyrio-Babylonian poetry a perfectly consistent parallel 
has arisen to the Hebrew psalms themselves, especially 


as far as concerns the external form of their lyrics. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 187 


‘*O Lord, Thou who judgment pronouncest on earth and in heaven, 
Against whose decrees there is none who prevaileth, 
Thou who fire and water controllest, and guidest each breath-en- 
dowed creature, 
Who of the gods can come near Thee in power majestic ? 
In heaven—who is exalted? Thou alone art exalted! 
On earth—who is exalted? Thou alone art exalted! 
When Thy word goeth forth in the heavens, the heavenly hosts! 
bow before Thee ; 
When Thy word goeth forth upon earth, the spirits of earth? 
kiss the ground. 
When upward mounteth Thy word like a hurricane, food and 
drink are in plenty abounding. 
Resoundeth Thy word in terrestrial places, green groweth the 
grass in the meadows. 
Thy word maketh fat the flocks and herds, and increaseth all 
breath-endowed creatures, 
Thy word bringeth truth and justice to pass, so that truth by 
mankind may be spoken, 
Thy word’s like the heavens afar or the earth deeply hidden— 
none can it fathom, 


Thy word—who can learn it? Or who canstruggle against it?” 


This might be a psalm of the Old Testament after 
the manner perhaps of the 148th, yet the words are taken 
from a Babylonian hymn addressed to the local deity of 
Ur, the moon-god, and show plainly how similar was the 
poetical form of religious songs of the two lands; the 
verses are usually formed of two parallel portions and two 
or more of the individual verses unite to form a stanza. 

The Babylonian psalms, certain ones of which the 
Babylonians themselves divided off metrically by strokes, 
unite with the Creation Epic to add a new and rich element 


1 Jorg, i. e., ‘the strong ones” of heaven. 
2 Anunnak?, i. e., ‘‘the strong ones’ of the earth. 


188 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


to the question which has for centuries been a mooted 
subject; namely, whether or not, and to what degree and 
extent a definite rhythm depending on rise and cadence 
might be accepted as existing within the divisions of a 
separate line.‘ Some of the Babylonian psalms’ in which 
smaller or larger groups of lines begin with the same sy]l- 
lable, furnish parallels to the so-called acrostic psalms of 
the Old Testament, in which every line or group of lines 
begins with a definite letter arranged in alphabetical order. 

It will continue to redound to the glory of the later 
Old Testament knowledge that by an untiring application 
to progressive work it has struggled through to the now 
almost universally accepted truth that much the greater 
number of the Old Testament psalms belong to the latest 
period of Hebrew literature; that especially the seventy 
odd psalms labeled ‘‘of David’’ are later addenda most in- 
consistent in language and theme; that on the whole not 
a single psalm of the Old Testament can be proved to be 
of David’s authorship—or can even be assigned to him 
with any degree of probability. And it only remains to 
wish that the knowledge may extend to broader circles, 
since that labeling of the psalms ‘‘of David’’ is especially 
adapted to thoroughly veil the development of the Jewish 
religion. Meanwhile, however easy it would be because 
of these facts, to admit an influence of the Babylonian 


1 See Ed. Sievers, Metrische Studien, 1. Studien zur hebriischen Metrtk, 
Proceedings of the philological-historical department of the Kgl. Sachs. Ges. d. 
Wiss. Bd. XXI, No. I and II, Leipsic, 1901. See also H. Zimmern, ‘‘Ein vor- 
laufiges Wort iiber babylonische Metrik,” in the Zeztschrift fur Assyriologie, VIII, 
1893, pp. 121-124; also zbzd. X, pp. 1-24; and compare my article ‘‘Das babylonische 
Weltschépfungsepos" in the Proceedings of the philological-historical department 
of the Kgl. Sachs. Ges. d. Wiss., XIII, 1896, pp. 60-68. 


2 E. g., K. 9290+ K. 9297+K. 3452—K. 8463. Sp. II, 265 a. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 189 


lyrics upon the Hebrew, yet I will limit myself entirely 
to pointing out the parallels. And I do this the more 
willingly since the near relationship of the Hebrew and 
Semitic Babylonian, as well as the similarity of their 
language, modes of thought and points of view, are clearly 
enough explained when the two systems of poetry fre- 
quently prove to be alike in language and style, rhythm, 
thought and figures. 

Whoever knows his Psalms, will recall the extrava- 
gant wretchedness of body and soul into which the poet 
has fallen by sin and retribution, by persecution and 
threats: he cries from out of the depths, he sinks in deep 
mire, he goes about wailing as one that mourneth for his 
mother, his strength is dried up like a potsherd, his bones 
and his soul are distressed, he is like a pelican of the 
wilderness, and laments like a dove, his heart beats wildly, 
his soul already dwells in Sheol and is encompassed by 
the sorrows of death. ‘‘I am weary with my groaning: 
all the night make I my bed to swim: I water my couch 
with my tears’’ (Ps. vi. 6). All these and many similar 
thoughts and pictures we read also almost literally in the 
Babylonian psalms. ‘‘lamenting he sits amid grievous 
complaints, in anguish of spirit.’’ Like a dove he mourns 
bitterly both day and night, to his merciful God he cries 
like a wild beast, his form is bent like a reed, his heart 
takes its flight, he is already the prey of death, the tomb 
stands open, vermin are lying in wait for him. Yes, 
certain Old Testament psalms like Psalm 1xxxviti, that 
melancholy cry of distress from the heart of one who was 
abandoned as if he were dead, deserted by his fellows and 
confined within himself from his youth up, bear a strong 


190 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


resemblance to the Babylonian songs of lamentation in 
their entire line of thought. For instance I have in mind 
the Babylonian dirge,’ in which a pious man who was 
sorely afflicted describes his wretched condition in the 
following parting words: 


‘‘My dwelling has become a prison, 
In the bonds of my flesh my members are stricken, 

In fetters of my own my feet are entangled... 
My persecutor tracks me all the day, 

Nor in the night time hath my pursuer let me draw a breath. 
Torn asunder, my bones have become disjointed, 

Loosened are my limbs and stretched upon the ground... 
No god came to help, none gave me gently his hand, 

No goddess had pity upon me, nor helpfully walked by my side. 
Wide open stood my coffin; they made ready for my burial, 

While yet I was alive, funeral songs for me were sung, 
And vermin they called to destroy me. 

My adversary hath heard it, his face beams with radiance, 


Delightedly was my undoing noised abroad, and his heart rejoiced.” 


Instructive, too, are the manifold references on both 
sides to personal enemies and malicious foes. The Old 
Testament psalms contain many such prayers of devout 
and righteous Israelites against those who hate them to 
the death, against those enemies who laugh aha! aha! 
with grinning mouth when misfortune or destruction 
comes upon them. That realistic psalm from the bed 
of sickness (xli) closes with these words, ‘‘But thou O 
Lord, be merciful unto me and raise me up that I may 
requite them,’’ referring to those enemies who had already 
desired the singer’s death. These malicious enemies are 
to be ‘‘brought to confusion together and clothed with 


1TV R 60, together with VR 47. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 191 


shame and dishonor’? (xxxv. 26) and the singer longs for 
the time when he may ‘“‘see his desire upon his enemies’’ 
Giv. 7 dix: 10). 

In like manner a prayer to Nebo begins, ‘‘I declare 
thy renown O Nebo, above all great gods, [in spite of the 
crowd | of my adversaries my life was taken,’’ and closes, 
‘In spite of the crowd of my adversaries thou, O Nebo, 
wilt not forsake me; in spite of the crowd of them that 
hate me thou wilt not forsake my life.’”’ 

We read similar passages in a penitential psalm ad- 
dressed to the goddess Istar which has been published by 
L. W. King in his work The Seven Tablets of Creation.’ 

As a further instance of Babylonian poetry this psalm 
is quoted entire from Professor King’s translation (zézd. 
Wolesl,*pp. 223-237) : 


“I pray unto thee, lady of ladies, goddess of goddesses! 
O Ishtar, queen of all peoples, directress of mankind! 
O Irnini, thou art raised on high, mistress of the Spirits of 
heaven ; 
Thou art mighty, thou hast sovereign power, exalted is thy name! 
Thou art the light of heaven and earth, O valiant daughter of 
the Moon-god. . 
Ruler of weapons, arbitress of the battle! 
Framer of all decrees, wearer of the crown of dominion! 
O lady, majestic is thy rank, over all the gods is it exalted! 
Thou art the cause of lamentation, thou sowest hostility among 
brethren who are at peace ; 
Thou art the bestower of strength! 
Thou art strong, O lady of victory, thou canst violently attain 
my desire! 
1K, 1285, published by James A. Craig, in the first volume of his Assyrian 
and Babylonian Religious Texts, Leipsic, 1895, p. 5 ff. 
2 London, 1902, Vol. II, Plate LXXV—LXXXIV. 


192 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


O Gutira, who art girt with battle, who art clothed with terror, 
Thou wieldest the sceptre and the decision, the control of earth 
and heaven! 


Holy chambers, shrines, divine dwellings, and temples worship 


thee ! 

Where is thy name not (heard)? Where is thy decree not 
(obeyed) ? 

Where are thine images not made? Where are thy temples not 
founded ? 


Where art thou not great? Where art thou not exalted ? 

Anu, Bel, and Ea have raised thee on high, among the gods 
have they made great thy dominion, 

They have exalted thee among all the Spirits of heaven, they 
have made thy rank pre-eminent. 

At the thought of thy name the heaven and the earth quake, 

The gods tremble, and the Spirits of the earth falter. 

Mankind payeth homage unto thy mighty name, 

For thou art great, and thou art exalted. 

All mankind, the whole human race, boweth down before thy 
power. 

Thou judgest the cause of men with justice and righteousness ; 

Thou lookest with mercy on the violent man, and thou settest 
right the unruly every morning. 

How long wilt thou tarry, O lady of heaven and earth, shep- 
herdess of those that dwell in human habitations ? 

How long wilt thou tarry, O lady of the holy E-anna, the pure 
Storehouse ? 

How long wilt thou tarry, O lady, whose feet are unwearied, 
whose knees have not lost their vigor ? 

How long wilt thou tarry, O lady of all fights and of the battle ? 

O thou glorious one, that ragest among the Spirits of heaven, 
that subduest angry gods, 

That hast power over all princes, that controllest the sceptre of 
kings, 

That openest the bonds of all handmaids, 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 193 


That art raised on high, that art firmly established, — O valiant 
Ishtar, great is thy might! 

Bright torch of heaven and earth, light of all dwellings, 

Terrible in the fight, one who cannot be opposed, strong in the 
battle! 

O whirlwind, that roarest against the foe and cuttest off the 
mighty ! 

O furious Ishtar, summoner of armies ! 

O goddess of men, O goddess of women, thou whose counsel 
none may learn! 

Where thou lookest in pity, the dead man lives again, the sick 
is healed ; 

The afflicted is saved from his affliction, when he beholdeth 
thy face! 

I, thy servant, sorrowful, sighing, and in distress cry unto thee. 

Look upon me, O my lady, and accept my supplication, 

Truly pity me, and hearken unto my prayer! 

Cry unto me ‘‘It is enough!” and let thy spirit be appeased ! 

How long shall my body lament, which is full of restlessness and 
confusion ? 

How long shall my heart be afflicted, which is full of sorrow and 
sighing ? 

How long shall my omens be grievous in restlessness and 
confusion ? 

How long shall my house be troubled, which mourneth bitterly ? 

How long shall my spirit (be troubled), which aboundeth in 
sorrow and sighing ? 

O[ . . . J] Irnini, fierce lioness, may thy heart have rest! 

Is anger mercy? Then let thy spirit be appeased! 

May thine eyes rest with favor upon me; 

With thy glorious regard truly in mercy look upon me! 

Put an end to the evil bewitchments of my body; let me behold 
thy clear light! 

How long, O my lady, shall mine enemies persecute me? 

How long shall they devise evil in rebellion and wickedness, 


194 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


And in my pursuits and my pleasures shall they rage against me? 

How long, O my lady, shall the ravenous demon pursue me? 

They have caused me continuous affliction, but I have praised 
thee. 

The weak have become strong, but I am weak ; 

I am sated like a flood which the evil wind maketh to rage. 

My heart hath taken wing, and hath flown away like a bird of 
the heavens ; 

I moan like a dove, night and day. 

I am made desolate, and I weep bitterly ; 

With grief and woe my spirit is distressed. 

What have I done, O my god and my goddess? 

Is it because I feared not my god or my goddess that trouble 
hath befallen.me? 

Sickness, disease, ruin, and destruction are come upon me; 

Troubles, turning away of the countenance, and fulness of anger 
are my lot, 

And the indignation and the wrath of all gods and men. 

I have beheld, O my lady, days of affliction, months of sorrow, 
years of misfortune ; 

I have beheld, O my lady, slaughter, turmoil, and rebellion. 

Death and misery have made an end of me! 

My need is grievous, grievous is my humiliation ; 

Over my house, my gate, and my fields is affliction poured forth 

As for my god, his face is turned elsewhere ; 

My strength is brought to nought, my power is broken! 

But unto thee, O my lady, do I give heed, I have kept thee in 
my mind; 

Unto thee therefore do I pray, dissolve my ban! 

Dissolve my sin, my iniquity, my transgression, and my offence ! 

Forgive my transgression, accept my supplication ! 

Secure my deliverance, and let me be loved and carefully tended ! 

Guide my footsteps in the light, that among men I may gloriously 


seek my way! 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 195 


Say the word, that at thy command my angry god may have 
mercy, 

And that my goddess, who is wroth, may turn again ! 

The darkness hath settled down, so let my brazier be bright ; 

Thou art the ruler, let then my torch flame forth! 

May my scattered strength be collected ; 

May the fold be wide, and may my pen be bolted fast! - 

Receive the abasement of my countenance, give ear unto my 
prayer, 

Truly pity me, and [accept my supplication] ! 

How long, O my lady, wilt thou be angry and thy face be turned 
away ? 

How long, O my lady, wilt thou rage and thy spirit be full of 
wrath ? 

Incline thy neck which (is turned) avay from my affairs, and 
set prosperity before thy face; 

As by the solving waters of the river may thine anger be 
dissolved ! 

My mighty foes may I trample like the ground ; 

And those who are wroth with me mayest thou force into sub- 
mission and crush beneath my feet ! 

Let my prayer and my supplication come unto thee, 

And let thy great mercy be upon me, 

That those who behold me in the street may magnify thy name, 

And that I may glorify thy godhead and thy might before 
mankind ! 

Ishtar is exalted! Ishtar is queen! 

My lady is exalted! My lady is queen! 

Irnini, the valiant daughter of the Moon-god, hath not a rival !” 


But the significance of the Babylonian psalms 1s still 
further enhanced by the fact that they offer us a particu- 
larly clear insight into the moral and religious ideas of 
the Assyrians and Babylonians. Of course it is clear 
without further question that the accounts of wars and 


196 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


triumphs of the Assyrian kings are of as little value as 
sources for critique of the Assyrio-Babylonian religion, 
as, say, the annals of the Thirty Years War would be to 
familiarise any one with the Evangelical or Catholic re- 
ligion and ethics. Whoever aspires with earnest zeal to 
discover the ideas the Babylonians held in regard to man’s 
moral duties, to divinity and its attributes, to man’s re- 
lation to God and wece versa, cannot help becoming ab- 
sorbed in the epigrammatic wisdom of the Babylonians 
and in the religious content of their literary monuments. 

Since this has been undertaken hitherto by but very 
few people, I would like now to sketch in rough outlines 
a picture of the Babylonian ethics and religion. And this 
has the rather become a duty, since we have been com- 
pletely misled with reference to Babylon by traditional 
historical treatment; but henceforth we will be in a 
position to examine critically and to pronounce judgment 
on the religious views of the Old Testament, and also in 
large part on our own, from this newly acquired Babylonian 
standpoint. 

What I emphasised some time ago’ has since been 
splendidly confirmed beyond all expectation by the Code 
of Hammurabi, viz., that the first and original commands 
of man’s impulse to self-restraint, and of human society, 
namely not to shed a neighbor’s blood, not to approach 
his neighbor’s wife, not to take unto himself his neighbor’s 
garment, were at least no more sacred and inviolable in 
Israel than in a typical constitutional state such as 
Babylon had been since the third millennium before Christ, 


1 Supra, p. 46. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 197 


and whose legislation arouses the admiration even of the 
modern world. 

This is equally true of most of the specific command- 
ments. Of the one with reference to honor due to parents, 
Hammurabi’s law takes account only in so far as punish- 
able violations are concerned; as, for example, in Sec. 
195, ‘‘If a child strikes his father, his hand shall be cut 
off’’ ; as for the rest, the documents of religious purport, 
psalms and prayers as well as the epigrammatic poetry 
of the Babylonians must serve as sources for the demands 
which Babylonian morals and piety made upon individuals. 
There is a text of this kind (IV. R. 51) where while 
seeking the cause of divine retribution which had befallen 
a man, among others the questions were asked: ‘‘Has he 
set the son against his father? Has he set the father 
against his son?’’ (Here follows the estrangement of 
mother and daughter, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, 
brother and brother, friend and friend.) ‘‘Has he not set 
free the captive? ....Perhaps it is a trespass against 
God, perhaps a crime against Istar; perhaps he has 
offended God, or scorned Istar, or held father and mother 
in contempt, disparaged his elder brother, or spoken 
untruthfully ....Hashe broken into his neighbor’s house? 
Has he approached his neighbor’s wife? Has he shed a 
neighbor’s blood ? Has he taken his neighbor’s garment ?”’ 

With reference to the commandment against adul- 
tery, compare Sec. 129a of the Hammurabi Code: ‘‘When 
a wife is discovered sleeping with another man, both shall 


) 


be bound and thrown into the water.’’? Transgression of 


the command, ‘‘Thou shalt not steal’’ is with a few ex- 


198 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


ceptions made punishable by death.*. The Code treats of 
murder in only two places. In the first section we read : 
‘When a man brings another under suspicion and accuses 
him of murder, but does not prove it, then he who has 
brought suspicion upon the other shall be put to death’’ ; 
and in Sec. 153 provocation for murder is mentioned, 
‘When a wife causes her husband’s death on account of 
some other man, she shall be hanged,’ zxza gashishi 
whakkant. 

The commandment, ‘‘Thou shalt not bear false 
witness against thy neighbor”’ is paralleled in Hammurabi 
Sec. 3, ‘‘Whoever bears false witness in a case at law, 
and can not support his testimony, that man shall himself 
be put to death, if the case is a trial for life.’ How 
strictly the unlawful appropriation of other people’s prop- 
erty was censured also in Babylon, may be seen in Sec. 
7, ‘‘Whosoever buys without witnesses or contract, or 
consents to keep either silver or gold, a man servant, or 
a maid servant, or an ox or a sheep, or an ass, or any 
other thing from bondman or free, that man is a thief and 
shall be put to death.’’ ‘This commandment which says, 
‘“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, wife, serv- 
ants, etc.,’’? implies nothing more than ‘‘Thou shalt not 
attempt to acquire for thyself, shalt not appropriate thy 
neighbor’s house, etc.’’ 

Quite analogous to this we read in Sec. 25 of the 
Code of Hammurabi, ‘‘When some one who has come to . 
extinguish a fire covets something that belongs to the 
master of the house, and helps himself to the property of 
the master of the house, he shall be thrown in the same 


1 See Sections 6, 7, 9, 10, 19, 25. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 199 


fire.’’ This Hebraic-Babylonian ‘‘coveting,’’ as we can 
see, implies the simultaneous action—Jesus with his ‘‘But 
Isay unto you”’ was the first to brand the sinful inclination 
or the evil desire as sin. And since to this day law and 
religion are inseparable in the Orient it must be recognised 
as a special merit of the Code of Hammurabi that it has 
avoided any confusion of law and religion within the Code 
itself. For this same reason all transgressions of the 
commandments are considered as sins against God which 
incur the wrath and vengeance of God over and above the 
earthly legal punishment. But we read that all the other 
duties over which the jurisdiction of authorities does not 
extend were impressed as rigidly upon the Babylonians 
as upon the Israelites, and their neglect threatened with 
divine punishment. 

Truthfulness stands first in this line. Hammurabi’s 
government knew how to protect its subjects effectively 
against false weight, false measure and false testimony. 
But the moral consciousness of the Babylonians as of the 
Israelites demanded truthfulness in a much broader and 
deeper sense, and, since this is true, it can only be a 
matter of regret that the Hebrew commandment instead 
of being limited to false witness was not worded so as to 
contain the more universal application ‘‘Thou shalt not 
lie.’ If we could have been so inocculated with the 
consciousness of the wrong involved in a lie in any form, 
from our earliest youth, as the Persians, according to 
Herodotus (I, 36), brought up their children from five to 
twenty years of age exclusively to the three things, riding, 
archery and truthfulness, it would have brought incalcu- 
lable blessing to the world. But falsehood existed even 


200 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


among the Babylonians. Not to keep the word one had 
given, to refuse the promised protection, to say ‘‘ yea”’ 
with the mouth and ‘‘nay”’ with the heart—generally 
speaking any lie was expressly and repeatedly branded 
as a sin contrary both to man’s law and to God’s; while 
on the other hand sincerity was regarded as a noble virtue. 

As far, however, as the virtue of love for one’s 
neighbor, and mercy towards one’s fellows is concerned, 
none will contest with the people of Israel the sublimity 
of their moral law, ‘‘Lovethy neighbor as thyself,’’ in spite 
of its undeniable limitation to the people of their own 
nation (Lev. xix. 18). But as gladly as we render to 
Judaism whatever credit is due, let us give just as freely 
and honestly to other nations what is theirs, and unto 
God what is God’s. We must not permit the virtue of 
neighborly love to be considered a monopoly of the He- 
brew people or such rash words to be spread abroad in the 
world as these, that ‘‘ The fundamental principles of all 
true morality ‘I desired mercy and not sacrifice’ (Hosea 
vi. 6, cf. Isaiah i. 11 ff, Mic. vi. 8 etc.) ‘Thou shalt love 
thy neighbor as thyself’ have no analogy whatever in 
Babylon.’’* If it seems at the outset quite unthinkable 
that the Babylonians who like the Hebrews, acknowledge 
themselves to be entirely dependent on the divine mercy, 
should have known in their time no love nor mercy toward 
their fellows, this assertion is directly contrary to the 
testimony of the monuments. I have previously pointed 
out® how the question was asked when seeking the cause 


of divinewrath: ‘‘Has he not set free a captive, and loosed 
?E. Sellin, ‘Ein Schlusswort zu Babel und Bibel” in the Evangelische 
Kirchen-Zeitung fiir Oesterreich, July 1903, No. 14, 15, p. 210. 
2 Supra p. 47. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 201 


the bound, and has he refused light to one who was im- 
prisoned ?’’ That was one instance. The British Museum 
contains clay tablets (unfortunately still incomplete) with 
Babylonian proverbs which give us glimpses into the 
depths of the moral and religious thought of the better 
class of Babylonians similar to those which the Code of 
Hammurabi has given of the ‘‘immeasurable culture’’ of 
this nation. ‘There we read maxims like these which in 
spite of the fact that they have been taught by the expe- 
rience of thousands of years, continue to be disregarded 
by mankind to their great injury: 


“(Open not wide thy mouth, and guard thy lips, 
Art thou aroused, speak not at once. 
If thou speak rashly, later thou’lt rue it, 
Rather in silence soothe thy spirit.”’ 


Just there’ we read the admonition of the Babylonian 
sages, which is comparable to a jewel whose radiance re- 
mains undisturbed by place and time: to show love to 
one’s neighbor, not to despise him nor oppress him harshly 
which would necessarily call down the wrath of God, but 
much rather to give food and drink to him whoasks, which 
is well pleasing in God’s sight, to be helpful and to do 
good at all times. While we are deep in perusal of tablets 
like these, we rejoice inwardly that the allmerciful God, 
who is Love, has not given his heavenly virtues exclu- 
sively to one people, but that his mercy reaches as far as 
the clouds extend, and therefore his reflection is found in 
the heart of man everywhere. 

These admonitions did not exist in word only, but 


1 See the table K. 7897 which is now completed, and is translated and published 
by K. D. Macmi’ an in the Pettrige zur Assyriologie, V. 1905. 


202 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


we read also of instances of their practice extending even 
to slaves. The Book of Kings closes with the account of 
a Babylonian king’s act of grace towards his political 
enemy—the liberation from prison of the King of Judah 
by Nebuchadnezzar’s son Evilmerodach. And whoever 
makes a careful study of the Code of Hammurabi will be 
obliged to admit that in spite of the fact that the life, 
property and reputation of each individual was carefully 
protected, and the conscientious performance of duty was 
required of every one of whatever calling or position, and 
every neglect of duty was visited with the strictest pun- 
ishment, with the purpose of intimidation; nevertheless 
gentleness, love and mercy came also to their rights: 
loving care for the invalid (Sec. 148), for the widows 
(Sec. 171-172a) and orphans (Sec. 177) , clemency toward 
the unfortunate debtor (Sec. 48), forbearance with the 
unruly son (Sec. 169). In fact why waste further words 
when it was shown at the beginning of the lecture that 
the Samaritans are really Babylonians as far as character 
is concerned and that the Jews pass for Kuthzans, i. e., 
Babylonians! Jesus himself has erected a monument to 
universal neighborly love, an ideal of the Babylonians, 
great-hearted in this point, too, in his divinely spiritual 
parable of the Good Samaritan, which towers perceptibly 
over the whole terrestrial globe! Yes, indeed, not only 
do Babel and Bible clasp hands in brotherly fashion 
whenever in the wide world Samaritan service is rendered, 
but the Babylonian has been set up by Jesus as a pattern 
for all mankind: ‘‘Go and do likewise !”’ 

Why Jesus chose the Samaritan to be the pattern of 
- the universal love which should encompass all men and 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 203 


nations without distinction, can now be fully comprehen- 
ded for the first time. The Code of Hammurabi has justly 
occasioned surprise, among other reasons because ‘‘a 
distinction between native and foreigner practically does 
not appear at all,’’ whence we may confidently expect to 
find that the repeated command of Israel to treat well the 
stranger within the gates will be missing in the Code. 


’? observes Kohler, (Hammurabis Gesetz, p. 


‘“Tt seems, 
139) ‘‘that in this respect a complete leveling has entered 
into Babylon, quite in accordance with historical precedent, 
while foreign tribes were transplanted more and more into 
Babylon, and a general commingling and amalgamation 
of the nations of the earth and their civilisations was 
brought about.’’ To this, also, corresponds the highly 
developed commerce, international relations and the char- 
acter of the civilisation inherent in Babylonian culture. 
We know that even Hammurabi like the later Babylonian 
kings regarded himself as lord of the earth, and like the 
. German emperors of the Middle Ages, aspired to include 
all tribes under his dominion and by so doing to wipe out 
all distinction between native and foreigner. 

Right here lies the difference between the juridical 
condition of Babylon and Israel; for in Israel the stranger 
remained a stranger and was kept aloof from the Israelitish 
national life; only the gér,‘ the foreign guest who enjoyed 
the protection of Israel, was included in the circle, and 
even he was not on an entire equality with the Israelites 
in legal privileges. This accounts for the standing in- 
junction to treat him well, an injunction which would 
have been out of place in Babylon where no discrimination _ 


204 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


was made between stranger and native-born. But what 
a contrast! Here in Israel a few refugees, probably 
deserters, exiles, fugitives, fearing either murderous 
revenge or punishment; there, a multitude of strangers ! 
This developed Babylon into the commercial metropolis 
of the world. 

To these and other commands and prohibitions were 
added in Babylonia as in Israel manifold priestly regula- 
tions with reference to the offering of prayer, -sacrifices 
and voluntary gifts, above all, however, the commandment 
not to ‘‘take the name of the Lord in vain,’’ that is, not 
to misuse it. Especially was it so absolutely sacrosanct 
in the eyes of the Babylonians to swear by the name of 
God, that in the Code of Hammurabi as far as has yet 
come to our notice, as well as in trial reports, the possi- 
bility of perjury is not even considered.‘ On the other 
hand the Babylonian was not supposed to eat without 
mentioning God’s name, always mindful of the duty of 
gratitude toward his maker. And if we take all the many 
passages in which the fear of God is made the most im- 
portant duty of man, and not to fear God appears as the 
root of all evil, we can confidently assert that to the Bab- 
ylonian as to the Hebrew, the fear of God was considered 
the beginning of wisdom. The saying ‘‘Fear God and 
honor the king’’ we read in the same terse style on a tablet 
in the library of Sardanapal. J//u tapalah sarru tana’ad. 
This reverence for the king which saw in the head of the 


1 For the refusal to taken an oath see the Code of Hammurabi, Sec. 20, 103, 
131, 206, 227, 249. Also all statements made ‘‘ before God”"’ as for instance esti- 
mates of losses (Sec. 9, 23, 120, 126, 240, 266, 281) are regarded as absolutely in- 
violable, truthful and incontestable. We learn the same facts from the law suits, 
the oath of the defendant determines the verdict. See for instance Bu. g1, 5-9; 
2181 (Cunetform Texts, II 46). 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 205 


state the representation of deity upon earth, this deference 
to the laws of the state given by the highest lawgiver of 
heaven and earth, and above all the fear of God,—these 
were the pillars upon which rested the duration of the Bab- 
ylonian government for 200 years in spite of surrounding 
enemies. How seriously the kings themselves regarded 
sin we learn from the inscription which the last Chaldean 
king caused to be placed on the tower of the Temple of 
the Moon, the closing prayer of which was to the effect 
that Belshazzar, the king’s eldest son, might be shielded 
from all sin. 

Every man who faces the facts with an unprejudiced 
mind will admit that the meaning of the idea of ‘‘sin,’’ 
or, in other words, the sum of all that man is in duty 
bound before God and man to do or to avoid, is entirely 
the same in Babel as in the Old Testament. And the 
same agreement may be noted with reference to the con- 
sequences of sin. 

No sin is hidden from the divine eye, none remains 
unpunished. ‘The consequence of sin is the wrath of God 
which acts upon the sinner like a spell and works itself 
out in punishment of sickness and misery, poverty and 
persecution, destruction and death.* The idea common 
to both Old and New Testaments that sickness and want 
are the wages of sin is exactly the Babylonian view, and 
I might add, it is fortunate that this is the case. For it 
justifies us to a greater degree in investigating the problem 
as to whether or not the relation of cause and effect be- 
tween sickness and sin may still be accepted in the light 
of later knowledge. 


' Ps. xxxviii. 3ff. ; Ixxxviii. 8 ff. ; xc. 7 ff. e¢ passim. 


206 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


With penitent confession and tearful prayers the de- 
vout Babylonian seeks to appease God’s wrath and to 
propitiate the heart of God, while he clings firmly to his 
confidence in God’s fatherly compassion. All the Old 
Testament prayers from the depths of wretchedness and 
sin, as Ps. vi. 1, ‘SO Yahveh, rebuke me not in thine an- 
ger, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure ;”’ the cry, 
‘OQ Lord, how long ?”’ all the expressions of longing for 
freedom from the bondage of sin, and at the same time 
for an end to illness, misery and persecution, as well as 
for the blessing of length of days in order to walk hence- 
forth in righteousness in God’s sight ; allthese professions 
of firm confidence in divine grace we read in the Babylo- 
nian prayers and psalms in varying styles of touching 
petition. 
“*O that the heart of the Lord would turn his wrath far from me! 
O Lord! my sins are many, great are my transgressions, 
O my God, my Goddess, whether known or unknown to me, 
Many are my sins and great are my transgressions.... 
I sought around about, but no one took my hand, 

I wept, but there was none came near to comfort. 
Icry aloud, but no one gives me ear, 

Sorrowful, and overwhelmed, I can not look up. 
Unto my compassionate God make I ’mid sighs my petition, 

The feet of my Goddess I kiss and embrace( ?) them. 
O Lord, cause not thy servant to fall 

Who lies in the pool of the mire!—help him up! 
The sins that I have committed, turn into mercies, 

The misdeeds I have done, let the wind bear away, 
My many wickednesses tear in pieces like a garment! 


' This is Dr. Delitzsch’s rendering, ‘'/m Wasser des Schlammes legend,” 
but Dr. Jastrow in The History of Religions interprets the same line as “‘over- 
flowing with tears," explaining in a footnote that the literal meaning is ‘‘rushing 
water."’ (Tr.) 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 207 


Yea, pardon all my misdemeanors, and I’ll obey thy sovereign 
power. 
Incline towards me thy heart, like the heart of a mother, 


Like a mother’s or father’s heart, incline Thou to me.” 


It goes without saying that in the Babylonian peni- 
tential psalms and prayers for the forgiveness, washing 
away, putting aside or saving from sin, the meaning of 
the prayer was first of all that the spell be broken and 
disappear, and that sickness, misfortune, misery and death, 
be driven from the body and from the house of the suppli- 
cant. Had it been otherwise the Babylonians would not 
have been human. But he grossly deceives himself and 
others who would maintain that Israel had a deeper, yea 


’? conception of the nature of sin. If 


‘‘infinitely deeper, 
perchance it is held that the Babylonians experienced a 
deep conviction of sin simply on account of its outward 
consequences, this would gainsay the oft reiterated lamen- 
tations of the devout Babylonian which mention always 
the sufferings of the sin-sick soul as well as material hard- 
ships. Whence it appears that the Babylonian religion 
developed an especially tender and devout view as to man’s 
faith concerning his relation to God, and the disruption 
of that relation by sin. 

Every human being, the king no less than every 
other mortal, is the ‘‘child of his God.’’ His God to 
whom he owes his life, has at the same time entered his 
being as his good spirit, guiding and protecting him. No 
more terrible blow can befall a human being—more terrible 
even than sickness and pain—than when because of his 
misdeeds his God (or in the case of the daughters of men, 
Goddess) departs from him and takes up an abode else- 


208 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


where. Such a literal abandonment by God and the re- 
sultant spiritual pangs are looked upon by the Babylonians 
as sin’s most dreadful curse. 

The sinner is dependent solely upon the grace of 
God, not only because in spite of rigorous self-examination 
he is often totally unaware of the sin he must confess, but 
because God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and some- 
times man thinks objectionable what is pleasing in God’s 
sight, and vzce versa. As appearsin IV R 10, 34b, “‘No one 
knows whether he is doing well (wdammzk) or ill (ukal- 
fil)’. But the Babylonian lives in the firm assurance of 


faith, that 
‘“‘Fear of God—begets grace, 


Sacrifice—strengthens life, 
And prayer—redeems from sin.”? 

Yes, the divinities are gracious and merciful, and 
gladly turn again to the repentant sinner. And this is 
especially true of Marduk whose favorite attribute is to 
awaken the dead, to revive anew the victims of death, and 
who is entirely devoted to deeds of mercy. The physician 
of both man’s body and soul, he is one of the brightest 
and noblest figures of the Babylonian pantheon. But all 
the other great gods are also looked upon as moral powers. 
The god Shamash, the sun-god, is called the ‘‘ King of 
Justice.’? He is the righteous and incorruptible judge 
whose eye penetrates into the most hidden depths, and as 
it is said of Yahveh (Ps. lxxxv. 13) : ‘“Righteousness 


shall go before him and shall set us in the way of his 


steps,’’? or (Ps. xcvii. 2) ‘‘Righteousness and judgment 
CLV RR 6o%. 
2-1K..7807, Ze 20122. 
3 The emandation from vayasfem (Ps. Ixxxv. 13) to vayashar (parallel 
Tsedek) is required by the context’ ! 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 209 


are the habitation of his throne,’’ so at all times the di- 
vinities ‘‘Judgment’’ and ‘‘ Righteousness’’ stand before 
the Babylonian sun-god (comp. Ps. Ixxxix. 15). And 
what a noble and lofty idea must have been connected 
with Marduk’s son Nebo that he should have been desig- 
nated and worshipped as the ‘‘ Light of Truth.’’ 

It is very clear from the above that the Babylonian 
gods, too, were “vzvg powers. In regard to this point we 
must learn all over again from the beginning. The Old 
Testament’s mocking description of the Assyrio-Babylo- 
nian gods as idols of wood and stone, manufactured by 
human hands, (e. g. Deut. iv. 28; Is. xliv. 9 ff. and xlvi. 
1-2), harps on an external of Babylonian worship. As 
our excavations have proved, the Holy of Holies (adytum ) 
of the Babylonian temple was so tiny a room that some- 
times it was entirely filled by the pedestal of the god’s 
statue and hardly permitted one priest any freedom of 
motion. ‘The image as such, accordingly, could not be 
intended as an object of worship on the part of the people, 
but it must rather have designated symbolically the place 
where the deity had especially chosen to dwell among men, 
particularly with his own people, and in order that he 
might surely be found at alltimes. Just as Yahveh, the 
God of Israel, when the center of power was established 
in Jerusalem and Solomon had built his temple upon 
Zion, chose Jerusalem for his earthly abiding place (1 
Kings viii. 44, 48; xi. 13 e¢ passem) and the temple on 
Zion for the house where his power dwelt; so Marduk 
selected the city of Babylon as the seat of his splendor, 
~ and the temple Esagila for the house that was dear to him. 
Man feels most near the divine when in the earthly house 


210 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


of deity. Therefore as the Hebrew singer longeth, yea - 
even fainteth, for the courts of Yahveh, so one devout 
Babylonian petitions in his evening prayer that he may 
be transported to Esagila, the sanctuary of Marduk. 

The removal of the image of a Babylonion god by the 
hands of an enemy, or the entire destruction of a shrine, 
was accordingly an infallible sign that the deity was angry 
and had withdrawn into the heavens. When the divine 
wrath subsided the god came back to his dwelling place 
here below, just as Yahveh returned to his city, and to 
his land and people after the exile was over. It was nat- 
ural for a simple people to feel a certain veneration for the 
serious and dignified images of the gods when they were 
carried forth in solemn procession, and even for the 
smaller statuettes which may have been sold to believers 
by the temple authorities. But this image worship was 
by no means the kernel of the Babylonian religion as even 
the prophets of Judea knew of a mysterious mountain of 
God in the north upon which the Babylonian gods dwelt 
(Is. xiv. 13; Cf. Ez. xxviii. 14, 16) and clearly recognised 
the difference between the gods themselves, and their 
‘“modes of representation’’ on earth. In an article entitled 
‘“The Towers of Zion’’ in a Catholic periodical (Zwan- 
ztgstes Jahrhundert, March 14, 1903) we read: 

‘Tt is superfluous in these days to prove the justifi- 
cation of the use of images. Only let this fact be borne 
in mind. Corresponding to the spiritualised sensuous 
nature of man, the use of images as modes of representa- 
tion of transcendental truths is entirely in accordance 
with reason, and the esteem or comparative worship in 
which they are held, is psychologically well founded.”’ 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 25% 


In the same way the Babylonian image worship may be 
justified." 

It could not well be otherwise than that the powers 
and manifestations of the living deity should seem as living 
deities, since each was individually personified. And so 
the Assyrio-Babylonian gods differ in no particular as far 
as their atfrzbutes are concerned from Yahveh, the God of 
Israel. They, too, do whatsoever they please in heaven 
and earth, in the seas and all deep places (Ps. cxxxv. 6). 
As the mountains melt like wax before Yahveh, so the 
word of the gods levels mountains to the ground. Marduk 
commands and it is done, and as in Nahum 1. 4 we read 
of Yahveh’s word of wrath and power, 


‘“‘He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry 
And drieth up all the rivers ; 
Bashan languisheth and Carmel, 


And the flower of Lebanon languisheth ;” 


so also as a surprising coincidence we find in a psalm to 
Marduk, 
‘¢ Thy word is an exalted net, o’er heaven and earth extended ; 
It cometh over the sea and the sea recedeth backwards, 
It cometh over the meadow and the meadow lamenteth, 


It cometh over the flood of Euphrates’ waters, 
And thy word, O Marduk, troubleth the bed of the river(?).” 


The Babylonian gods, too, let their word pass through 
heaven and earth now ina breath of wind, now in the blast 
of a storm, and ‘‘speak’’ to men, especially to their cho- 
sen prophets and seers. 

The gods see all and know all; their glance penetrates 
into the deepest secrets; they observe the paths of nations 


1Cf. supra p. 106. 


2 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


just as they examine the heart and try the reins of each 
individual; they are present with every person. ‘There- 
fore the Babylonian lived in the firm belief that his god 
heard his fervent supplication and received him into his 
favor. ‘*Prayer-answering, petition-granting,’’ were 
favorite epithets of the Assyrio-Babylonian deities. Every 
day and many times every day the Babylonian raised his 
hands to the gods, full of confidence that they were at all 
times able and ready to grant their gracious aid, and I do 
not know that the power of prayer can be expressed in 
more beautiful words than we read on the Assyrian clay 
tablet to which frequent reference has previously been 
made (K. 7897) : 


‘«Prayer, supplication and worship 
Thou should’st offer at early morn, and thy strength will increase, 
And they will lead thee with God until the end.” 


To repeat, man is entirely dependent upon divine 
mercy from his entrance into life until its close, whence 
it becomes him to walk in humility. Joyfully welcomed 
by his parents as the gift of divine grace, every child, 
whether boy or girl, travels the path of life under the 
protection of God. As it is said in Job (xiv. 6),‘ ‘‘ Look 


”? so we read the 


away from him, and all is over with him, 
reverse in the cuneiform tablets, ‘‘If thou, O goddess 
lookst graciously upon him, he will surely live ;’’ (K. 101, 
Obv.) or, ‘‘ Wherever thou lookst, there the dead live 
again, the sick recovers; what is wrong becomes right 
when thy countenance is seen.’’ (26187 Z 40 ff.) And 
the best benediction which the parting Babylonian priest 


1 The Authorized Version differs from Professor Delitzsch’s interpretation of 
this passage. It reads, ‘'Turn from him, that he may rest.” Tr. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. Z13 


could and did leave with the sick or suffering, sounds very 
like the expression from Psalms (xxxi, 5) with which 
Jesus closed his eyes upon the cross, ‘‘ Commit thyself 
into the gracious hands of thy God.”’ 

As we have seen, the ethical and the religious feeling 
of the Babylonian nation did not suffer in spite of the poly- 
theistic character of its faith and cult. Instead, we find 
in all main points a far reaching unity between them and 
the Israelites. Indeed, even with reference to the regard 
felt for the sacrificial system, that ‘‘ heathenish’’ feature 
which clung also to the religion of Yahveh, we meet with 
a tremarkable parallel. It is justly considered as an in- 
stance of enlightenment of certain isolated Israelitish 
singers and prophets, when Hosea (vi. 6) causes Yahveh 
to say: ‘‘ For I desired mercy and not sacrifice, and the 


” or when 


knowledge of God more than burnt offerings, 
the singer of the fiftieth psalm in the second century be- 
fore Christ, one who developed religion in the fullest sense 
of the word, represents God as denouncing in vigorous 
language the official ritual of sacrifices, and pronounces 
thanksgiving and vows to be the offering most pleasing 
in God’s sight. The most significant portion of the 


chapter consists of verses 7 to 15:' 


‘¢Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, and I will 
testify against thee: I am God, even thy God. 

I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices or thy burnt offerings, 
to have been continually before me. 

I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy 
folds. 


1 Cf. Is. i. 1x ff.; the passage cited on p. 113, Mi. vi. 6-8; and on page 100, 
Ps. li, 17; also xl. 6. 


214 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a 
thousand hills. 

I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of 
the field are mine. 

If I were hungry, I would noi tell thee: for the world is mine, 
and the fulness thereof. 

Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats ? 

Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the 
most High: 

And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and 
thou shalt glorify me.”’ 


But even to these deep and refined thoughts we find 
analogies in Babylonia (K. 7897 Z 12-15) : 


‘‘Offer prayers to God each day; 
Words of purity are the worthiest burnt offering. 
Towards thy God shouldst thou act with sincerity, 
For that is the worthiest part of divinity.” 


ate 
Be 


It is not altogether easy to enter deeply into the Bab- 
ylonian God-conception which was original with the Su- 
merians and was later adopted by the immigrant Semites 
as an integral part of Sumerian culture and was trans- 
mitted unchanged to a greater or less degree. And yet 
with the help of the cuneiform monuments we may conjure 
up the following picture. 

Far down in the most southern portion of the Baby- 
lonian lowlands where the two rivers sought to reach the 
sea through thick jungles of tall rushes, the Sumerian 
nation rose in the gray dawn of time in a brave but hard 
struggle with floods, blistering sunbeams, and many 
another foe to the dwellings of men. They supported 


“ 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 219 


themselves by agriculture and the raising of cattle, and 
because the welfare of the individual depended on the reg- 
ular and harmonious working together of many, they 
became the first pioneers of human culture and civilisation. 

But although the world was small in which man built, 
sowed and tended his flocks in the sweat of his face, still 
it was full of mysteries and overwhelming impressions 
vibrating under the manifest sway of invisible, unsearch- 
able, super-human, that is, godlike powers. Between the 
boundless, unfathomed, never resting ocean and the flow- 
ing torrents of the twin rivers now bringing blessing and 
now destruction, there lay like an island a piece of land 
drenched with water, which rewarded marvelously the 
industry of the people with the costliest gifts of grain and 
palms and every variety of fruit in inexhaustible profusion. 
And above earth and sea stretched the wide unexplored 
expanse of heaven with its myriad wonders! 

With exultant hearts men saw the sun’s fiery ball 
come forth in ever changeless majesty from heaven’s gate; 
but in. the evening when uncanny night sank down upon 
their dwellings and they observed the bright and countless 
host of stars and constellations upon the dark background 
of the sky, their eyes remained fixed with amazement 
upon each moving creature of light full of wonderful 
splendor, especially that glorious but mildly beaming star 
which accompanies the ball of the sun at its going and 
coming like a true and inseparable sister—Istar, the 
goddess who at evening time invites man to rest in the 
arms of love, and in the morning wakens him to the re- 
newed struggles of life. They greeted the moon with ever 
new thankfulness as a fatherly friend and protector when 


216 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


at definitely appointed times he turned toward mankind 
now his sickle, and now his full and brillant diadem, 
while the borders of his light garments fluttered over 
meadows and streams of water. 

All this they observed,—and besides, the manifold 
destructive powers, the pestilence which creeps up in the 
dark and suddenly lays its victims low, and the sand 
storms which come rushing along from the desert with 
horrible and pitiless force, and even darken the face of 
heaven; all these filled mankind with dread of the divine. 
They sought and discovered godlike powers, effects and 
revelations everywhere. From the heights of the heavens 
down to the earth and beneath it as well, in fire, in stream, 
in waving fields of grain, in each human being they saw 
a divine force operating, and thought that in each a god 
dwelt. 

‘‘Alles wies den eingeweihten Blicken, 
Alles eines Gottes Spur.” 
[Everything but proved the hallowed presence, 


Everything, the presence of some god. ] 


And as the ability to make tiles out of earth, and to 
put tilesand bricks together into houses, walls and towers, 
or the art of forcing pure gold into the service of men for 
all sorts of decorative purposes seemed godlike to them as 
gifts of the gods, so too in justice and righteousness they 
perceived creatures of divine origin. Not as if they wor- 
shipped the bricks as a kind of fetish (not even of the sun 
did they do that) but much rather did they see in the whole 
universe of nature and spirit, phenomena and effects of a 
God outside and far above the world whose empire ex- 
tended beyond earthly things. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. yAW) 





Fig. 95. BaByLontaN KupurRU SHOWING EMBLEMS OF THE Gops. 


218 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


The Babylonians personified separate divine manifes- 
tations as did all ancient peoples not even entirely except- 
ing the Hebrews, for I recall for instance the angel of the 
pestilence (2 Sam. xxiv, 15 ff.). Moreover, the imagi- 
nation of the Hebrews exacted the strict requirement that 
Yahveh as an invisible God could not and should not be 
represented pictorially, but this again was abundantly 
offset in that Yahveh himself appeared even in bodily and 
visible form upon earth having intercourse with men as 
the ‘‘angel of Yahveh’’—a personification of God to which 
there is no analogy either in Babylonia or Assyria. The 
Babylonians conferred upon their gods different degrees 
of rank according to their spheres of influence, their effi- 
cacy, or their mutual relationship, representing the now 
generative and now productive, now primary and now 
secondary phenomena as masculine or feminine, and under 
the figure of parents and children. Since the oldest forms 
of written characters for the word ‘‘month’’ have taught 
us that it is not made from ‘‘day’’ and the number 30, 
but is a comparative form of ‘‘day’’ by which ‘‘month’’ 
is designated, so to speak, as a single day raised to a higher 
power, I begin to realise why the Babylonians considered 
the moon-god as the father of the sun-god. And while 
they thus ingeniously personified single manifestations of 
deity, and saw the good, beneficent powers maintaining 
victories on every side over the evil and destructive agen- 
cies, they created a pantheon of gods, goddesses, and lesser 
divinities (angels and demons) full of imagination and 
poetry, and at the same time provided a favorable soil for 
mythological images and tales such as those which have 
been familiar to us since the days of Greece. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 219 


The Babylonians, too, were acquainted with a chariot 
of the sun-god to which strong and never wearied mules 
were daily harnessed, and they had mythical creatures 
like fauns and satyrs. While at the first glance emblems 
of the gods like those represented on the kudurru here 
reproduced, or, to select two in particular, one which re- 
presents the god Marduk, and one which symbolises Ea 
the god of the waters within and under the earth, might 
appear more like the denizens of hell; to him who searches 
farther and sees for instance the fish, the symbol of the 
water, united with the goat, this goat-fish becomes the 
symbolisation of the merrily gushing and blithely bubbling 





a 


Fig. 96. EmBLEem oF MARDUK. Fig. 97. EMBLEM oF Ea. 








spring—in other words, becomes simply poetry. And as 
the Babylonians were taught by constant observation of 
the sky to recognise the eternal laws of the gods in the 
courses of the stars and their constellations, so they 
thought to discover indications of the divine presence 
in every earthly thing, in great things and in small 
—and even in the very smallest, as the flight of birds. 
Hence the Babylonians prove to be seekers after God, 
yes, the most inquiring spirits among them even gave 
themselves up entirely to the search after God. 

Countless traces point to the fact that like the philos- 
ophers of Greece and Rome, the deeper thinkers of Bab- 


220 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


ylonia divined the ideal unity of the godhead behind the 
multiplicity of their individual gods.‘ Yet I may not 
carry out the proofs of this to completion, at least not 
with the purpose of comparing the Babylonian God-con- 
ception with Semitic monotheism. In this particular, 
Babel and Bible will always remain contrasts, although 
here again even in this contrast they prove to possess one 
parallel, the parallel of human imperfection, from which 





Fig. 98. A ScENE IN THE DESERT. 


even the Semitic, even the Israelitish God-conception is 


not free. 


* 
oo * 


Stern, motionless and dead, the monotonous desert 
stretched out as far as the eye can reach, and unspeakably 
monotonous was the life of the nomadic tribes. No seed 
time, nor harvest, and therefore, too, no appreciative joy 


1 Cf. Alfred Jeremias, Monotheistische Strimungen innerhalb der baby- 
lonischen Religion, Leipsic, 1904. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. VRE 


in the precious gifts of the earth; in consequence, too, of 
the unsettled wandering no investigating research in the 
miracles of the starry heavens. An entire lifetime was 
but a struggle for pasture ground and watering places, 
and victory was only possible because of the close unity 
of the race and the strict discipline of their warriors under 
the incontestable judgment of one man in command. A 
Semitic-Babylonian proverb says, ‘‘ Man is the shadow of 
God, the slave is the shadow of the man, but the king 
is like God.’’* Because of this saying Naram-Sin, the 
son of Sargon I, calls himself ‘‘the god of Agade’’ and is 
represented with the horn-bedecked head-covering. For 
the same reason probably, names of the deity are often 
found affixed to the names of the Semitic kings, as for 
instance, Shargani-shar-ali, Naram-Sin, Bfr-Sin, Ur- 
Ninib, Bur-Sin, Ishme-Dagan of Isin, Nfir-Adad, Rim- 
Sin; and Dungi of Ur sometimes follows this Semitic 
custom. We observe, too, that in the Code of Ham- 
murabi the property of a god or of the palace is 
equally respected (Sec. VI, 8) and in the letter of the 
gushing Adam-shum-usur to the Assyrian king, we find 
the words: ‘‘ The king’s father, my Lord, was the image 
(salam) of the god Bel; the king, my Lord, is also Bel’s 
image.’’ Of no less interest is the confession of a devout 
Babylonian (IV R 60* V R 47, II, 29-32) ‘“‘I taught my 
country to keep the name of God and to honor Istar’s 
name I instructed my people; the sublimity of the king 
I made equal to God and I had my people learn the fear 


of the palace.’’ It may be worth while to call attention 

1 In the Assyrian letter 80, 7-19, 22, Z. 30 ff. In distinction from the word 
avélu meaning ‘'slave’’ we have here, it seems to me, the really free man charac- 
terised by the plural avéé. 


222 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


to the interesting parallel that in the Amarna letters the 
king is called shar balétz, ‘‘the breath of life’’ just as in 
Lam. IV, 20 Yahveh’s anointed is called ‘‘the breath of 
our nostrils.’”* 

Whether and in how far the nature and life of the 
desert contributed to the Semitic God-conception is doubt- 
ful. At any rate, the Semitic nomads saw in El or God to 
whom they raised eyes, hands and heartas to their ‘‘goal,’’? 
one single and united being that made heaven and earth 
and alone exercises judgment over all above and below; 
that does not walk and act as man do, but remains un- 
changeable from generation to generation,—a truly ex- 
alted, serious and sublime God-conception which, however, 
after the manner of men immediately became confused. 
As the Sumerians split up the godhead into the single 
manifestations of divine power and wisdom, and in so doing 
forgot the fountain-head of the One, so the Semites divided 
the one God of heaven and earth into different racial and 
national gods. They drew him down to the narrow limits 
of their paltry separate existence, full of jealousy and love 
of fighting, and made the God of the universe their own 
personal special god under a name of their own particular 
dialect, and made themselves the people and property of 
this personal god. 

From this particularistic God-conception even the 


L3SSEN 


2 In spite of all expressions of my critics to the contrary, it is certain that the 
fundamental meaning of the Semitic word for ‘God," ’2?, ’e/, ‘‘aim” or ‘‘goal,” is 
direction. Not only because the former use of the word ’e/ in Hebrew proves it, 
but even the Assyrian-Babylonian scholars testify to the fact as unmistakably as 
possible. See supra, p. 60-61, and 148 ff. The traditional view to which the 
people have held so tenaciously and according to which ’e/ is thought to designate 
God as ‘‘the strong one,’ is without any trace of a linguistic support, and is at once 
wrecked upon the short z of the original particle ’z7. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 220 


great prophets of Judah and Israel did not succeed in free- 
ing themselves completely and permanently. As the 
Arabian is impervious to the truth that his Allah, the one 
omnipotent creator of heaven and earth of whom Moham- 
med taught him, is none other than Yahveh, the one om- 
nipotent creator of heaven and earth whose worship Moses 
kept alive in his people, so the Israelites since the time of 
their earliest forefathers worshipped the one God under 
the name of Yahveh,* the Moabites under the name of 
Kammosh’, and the Ammonites under the name of Melech 
(Milcom)?, i. e., the judge, but each without exception 
recognised the national gods of the others as actually and 
positively existing. It_is generally known that the Old 
Testament itself teaches this. 

We are all familiar with the beautiful passage in the. 
book of Ruth where Ruth’s sister-in-law at Naomi’s wish 
returned ‘‘unto her people and unto her gods’’ (Ruth i. 
15), while Ruth says to her mother-in-law ‘‘Thy people 


1 My earlier claim (see page 150) that the Semitic nation which had penetrated 
into Babylon seventy-five centuries before Christ and from which Hammurabi 
sprang knew and worshipped the God J/a've, /a’@ (i. e., Yahveh, Yahu) has bril- 
liantly triumphed over all criticism and doubt. Cf. Giesebrecht, /rzede fiir Babel 
und Bibel, p. 3 ff.; 41-47; also Kamphausen who says in the //storische Zezt- 
schrift,56, 488: ‘‘With praiseworthy discretion Zimmern points out (K A T 465- 
468) that the name Yahu or Yahveh appears in Babylonian language only as the 
name of a foreign God.’ Since it is well known that I myself have never made 
a different claim, another interpretation of these words would have been nearer 
the fact. 


2 The Assyrian rendering of the name of the national god of the Moabites by 
Kammtsu shows that the Hebrew KMVS# is more correctly vocalised Aamosh 
than Kemosh,; root form Kamméash. 


3 The designation of the highest god as Malach, ‘‘judge, king,” is known to 
have been spread in Canaan far beyond the Ammonite boundary, whence the cunei- 
form List of the Gods (K. 2100 Col. IV, 12) says that ‘‘'God" was called malahum 
in the western country. Observe here the same rendering of the vowel @ (.Siégo/) 
by the cuneiform a, as this Babylonian /éva proves to be in so many of the names 
of the exile. It is an acknowledged fact that the Babylonian system of punctuation 
made no distinction between a and @. 


224 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


shall be my people, and thy God, my God’’ (verse 16). © 
So speaks the simple faith of the people, and so too the 
historians and prophets who repeatedly mention Moab as 
the nation of Kammosh (Num. xxi. 29; Jer. xlviii, 46) 
as Israel is Yahveh’s people. And since we have not the 
slightest foundation for the suspicion that Kammosh was 
not worshipped as the one creator of heaven and earth as 
much as Yahveh or the ‘‘most high God’’ of Melchizedek 
(Gen. xiv. 18 ff.) or that the moral and religious life of 
the Moabites was below the level of Israel, so it is evident 
that the characterisation of the national gods of the Moab- 
ites and Ammonites as an ‘‘abomination’’ (1 Kings xi, 7) 
was purely the outcome of political jealousy. 

How indispensably a particular god as the head and 
representative of national unity seemed to the Semitic 
races, we have a glowing example in the Assyrians. When 
in the second half of the third millennium before Christ, 
the Semitic Babylonians who had pressed forward into the 
land which later was to be Assyria developed an indepen- 
dent national existence, they yielded themselves at once, 
without disparagement of the Babylonian pantheon which 
they brought with them, to their especial primitive na- 
tional god Asur (Ashzr, Ashur). He, the ‘‘saving’’ and 
‘‘holy’’ god, self-begotten, without even a consort, and 
not united with nature or any forces of nature but standing 
high above all, was thought of and worshipped as the first 
cause of all things, and as the father, lord and king of all 
the gods. As Yahveh is called ‘‘the God of gods’’ and 
‘‘ Lord of lords’’ (Ps. exxxvi, 2-3) so was Asur exactly 
the same; and if in Israel the cry was heard ‘‘ Who is like 
Yahveh among the gods?”’ so on the Tigris it resounded: 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 225 


“Who is like Asur among the gods?’’ But the princes 


‘‘priests of Asur’’ chosen by 


over the Assyrians were 
Asur since time immemorial to serve him as priests. 
Asur never ceased to be the only and most high na- 
tional God of the Assyrians although it is probable that the 
ancient Babylonian pantheon influenced Asur’s position 
among the other gods in many particulars. Although the 
ancient kings of Assyria preferred the titles ‘‘Bel’s viceroy, 
Priest of Asur,’’ thus rigidly distinguishing Asur from 
the Babylonian Bel, the lord of earth and of humanity, 
yet it was natural that Bel, the chief of the Babylonian 
gods, and Asur, of the Assyrian should gradually fuse into 
one idea. Indeed we find E-sur, the name of the temple of 
the Babylonian god Bel, the tutelary deity of Nippur, 
transferred to Asur’s temple Zsara and consequently Bel’s 
son Ninib called the son of Esara. Since Asur from the 
beginning dispensed with any consort (otherwise how 
easy it would have been to give him one by the name of 
Ashirtu!) and finally was assigned a goddess only to suit 


”” it is easy to realise that Bel’s consort Bélzt 


the ‘‘system, 
zlént was permitted to be Asur’s wife at the same time. 
With the interchangeableness of Asur and Bel it is in- 
teresting to compare the analogous case of Marduk and 
Bel, as it is strikingly brought out in the Marduk-litany,’ 


”? and also in another 


‘Thy city Nippur cast not aside; 
passage,* where Bel the second god of the highest trinity 
is missing because he has just been identified with Mar- 


duk.} 


1TV R 18 No. 2+BE 13 420. See Weissbach’s J/¢scellen No. XIII. 

2 Z 63-64 and 25-30. 

3 The treatise of Morris Jastrow, ‘‘The God Ashur" in the /ournal of the 
American Oriental Society (KXTV> 1903, 282-311) suffers from the fundamental 


226 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


The chosen people! The egotistic appropriation of 
the Most High on the part of the single Semitic tribes 
necessarily led to the further acceptation that every nation 
was ‘‘chosen’’ by the God concerned to serve him exclu- 
sively,—an acceptation well adapted to fill the particular 
tribe with especial pride. It is a well-known fact with 
what self-satisfaction the Moslem looks down upon all the 
nations of the earth who were not predestined like himself 
by Allah to know and worship the true God. In the same 
way in the case of Asur’s people we meet with the same 


) 


idea of ‘‘election,’’ although without the slightest admix- 
ture of contempt towards the other nations and their gods. 
Ashur is the city, the land of Asur; the Assyrians his 
people, and especially the priest-kings of Assyria consid- 
ered themselves called of Asur from the beginning to fear 
him, and their race chosen to be Asur’s priests and min- 
isters forever. In the same way Israel is the chosen 
people of Yahveh, not of God in our present comprehensive 
sense any more than the Assyrians as the people of the 
Lord God Asur could advance the claim of passing for the 
chosen people of ‘‘God.”’ 

The national god made a contract with his people 
which in Israel was even strengthened by a special exter- 
nal symbol, the circumcision (Gen. xvii. 10-14). He 
hated those who hated his people, and blessed those who 
blessed his people. Therefore Israel’s enemies were co 
ipso, enemies of Yahveh (Ps. Ixxxiii). ‘‘I (Yahveh) will 
be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto 


thine adversaries’? (Ex. xxiii. 22). And just as Yahveh 
error that it confuses the adjective forms under consideration in the name Asur, viz., 
ashir, ashur from ashéru, ‘‘to be saving, prosperous” (whence too the Hebrew 
asher is derived) with the participle éskzr from ashdéru, ‘‘to have charge.” 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 227 


went to battle before Israel’s hosts or Zebaoth, against her 
enemies, so Asur starts out with the armies of his people 
to battle and to victory. Therefore we often see on the 
Assyrian reliefs, the symbol of the god Asur in front of 
or above the royal commander, in the whirl of battle or in 
the triumphant return. This symbol represents a half 
figure of a bearded man in the center of a circle, the sym- 
bol of eternity, the whole borne upon wide spreading wings 
similarly to the way Yahveh is represented as flying upon 
the wings of the wind (Ps. xviii. 10). And as Yahveh 
is poetically represented as armed with shield, buckler 
and spear (Ps. xxxv. 2-3) or as it is said of him in the 





yy ieee jue 


Ny 


Fig. 99. SYMBOLS OF ASUR. 


seventh Psalm (verses 12-13): ‘‘If he turn not, he will 
whet his sword; he hath bent his bow, and made it ready. 
He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death,”’ 
(Cf. Ps. xxi. 12), so Asur too appears armed with the 
bow. Ifa battle is to be fought, he is seen drawing the 
death-dealing arrow from the string; if victory is won he 
lowers his bow. The Assyrian standards also show the 
archer Asur standing upon an ox (Cf. Ps. xviii. 10) or 
hovering above oxen as he draws the arrow against his 
enemies and the foes of his people. 

Although Yahveh himself was not symbolised by any 
image, but was thought to dwell in the sanctuary of the 


= 
>. 
S 
~ 
ZN 
x 
2S 
~ 
Sone 
NS 
a 





ASUR OVER ASURNAZIRPAL IN BATTLE. 


Fig. 100. 
From a photograph by W. A. Mansell & Co, 


Original in the British Museum. 


‘wasn YSN ey} Ul yeuIsugQ ‘0D y TJesueI “V ‘MA 4q ydeasZojoyd & wo1g 
(‘0 ‘a 09g-Sgg) “IvddIZVNUASY AO NUNLAY IVHAWAINT AKT ‘101 “sy 





230 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


ark of the covenant, yet his invisible throne (in remarkable 
contradiction to the absolute prohibition of the decalogue 
against any likeness) was thought to be hovering over 
cherubim (‘‘he sitteth between the cherubim,’’ Ps. xcix. 
1). The representation of these higher angelic figures 
the Hebrews must have adopted as they found them from 
other people with whom they came in contact. And the 
most probable theory is that they were representations 





Fig. 102. ASSYRIAN STANDARDS. 


similar to the winged oxen deities of Assyria. The As- 
syrian standards which show Asur standing on or hovering 
over oxen, favor this acceptation. 

How deeply rooted the belief was among the Semites 
that every nation and every land had its special divinity 
who wished and was permitted to be worshipped according 
to the custom of his own country, the Old Testament like- 





BABEL AND BIBLE. aN 


wise teaches in two memorable narratives. We read in 
the Second Book of Kings (xvii. 25-28) that as long as 
the people who were transplanted into Samaria from Babel, 
Kutha, Hamath, etc., ‘‘ feared not the Lord”’ and ‘‘know 
not the manner of the God of the land,’’ Yahveh sent 
lions among them until at the command of the Assyrian 
king one of the priests of Israel was brought back to Bethel 
and ‘‘taught them how they should fear the Lord.’’ Sargon 
did the same thing according to the Sargon cylinder (74) 
with the captive tribes of many tongues who were located 
in his capital city; he had them taught by especially 
qualified Assyrians the ‘‘fear of God and the king.’’’ 
And in the fifth chapter of the Second Book of Kings we 
are told that Naaman, captain of the Syrian hosts, when 
he had been healed of his leprosy and turned to Yahveh, 
took with him ‘‘two mules’ burden of earth’’ in order to 
worship Yahveh on Yahveh’s own soil. Corresponding 
to this conviction, all the Semitic tribes immigrating into 
Babylonia accepted at once the intrinsically Sumerian 
religion of theland ; Terach at an early day became ‘‘ idol- 


”” in Babylon, and even Yahveh-fearing parents in 


ater 
exile called their child after the name of a Babylonian 
deity ; as, for instance Mordecai, Esther’s foster father, 
was consecrated by his father to the god Marduk. 

In this way and in no other we can understand what 
would otherwise be incomprehensible; namely, why after 
they had penetrated into Canaan, the Israelites both high 
and lowly took up almost from physical necessity the cult 


of their new Canaanite home, the worship of Baal and 


1 mdré Ashshtr mtdit(e) z-nt kalama ana shthuzt stbitte-¢ palah tliu sharrz 
aklé shairé uma‘irshuntte. 


232 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Ashera on the ancient sacred high places. And the pre- 
exilic prophets in spite of the titanic fight which they 
maintained for Yahveh against the Canaanite idolatry of 
their companions could not succeed in attaining any last- 
ing results. It was truly a dramatic struggle which these 
inspired, austere, fearless men waged untiringly against 
kings and nation, urging their people to purity of life 
with the ardor of a holy passion, with rapturous eloquence 
and with every available means, by promises and threats, 
in order to keep Israel even on the ground of the captured 
land of Canaan, to the God of her fathers and forefathers, 
and to preserve the nation pure and unpolluted as a polit- 
ical and religious unity. 

Parallels between Babel and Bible may also be found 
in religious ecstasy, or prophecy,—that condition in which 
personalities, highly endowed with spiritual gifts and 
ardently zealous for great political, ethical or religious 
ideals, feel themselves seized and impelled by God him- 
self, and in such a frame of mind publish abroad visions, 
maxims, and speeches usually of a lofty, poetical tenor 
and winning eloquence. As there were many holy men in 
Israel and Judah who were conscious of the spirit of God 
working in them, and were therefore convinced that Yah- 
veh himself spoke in them and through them (Amos iii. 
8; vii. 14-15), so too in Babylonia and Assyria there were 
seers and prophets and prophetesses like Huldah (2 Kings 
xxii. 14) who were in particularly close communion with 
deity and made known the divine will to king and people. 

In Assyria and Israel the prophets were sought to 
inquire of heaven whether or not the armies should start 
out to war (1 Kings xxii; 2 Kings iii). In both cases 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 233 


we hear at the beginning the encouraging ‘‘ Fear not, I 
afn with thee’’; we read the declaration that God would 
go with them to battle and would destroy the enemy of 
his people with fire, and we gladly hear the words of the 
prophet ending ‘‘that ye may know I am Yahveh’’ (1 
Kings xx. 13, 28) or Nebo, or Istar, as the case may be. 
Interesting cuneiform parallels may be found in many 
single passages in the Old Testament prophecies as well 
as the Psalms, as a result of the same modes of thought 
and speech in both Semitic nations. One of these seems 
especially worthy of note in this corinection. In Zeph. 
ili. 13, we read of the absolutely happy condition of Israel 
in the last days, ‘‘ The remnant of Israel shall not do iniq- 
uity, nor speak lies; neither shall a deceitful tongue be 
found in their mouth, for they shall feed and lie down and 
none shall make them afraid.’’ This coupling of the practice 
of righteousness and truthfulness with quiet and peace- 
ful pasturage is certainly peculiar, but it is to be found in 
just the same way in the cuneiform literature as the 
promise of an ideal and blessed existence. For instance, 
we read in destiny tablets, ‘‘If the sun and moon are seen 
together on the fourteenth day, the speech of the land 
will be truthful, truthful words will be in the mouths of 
the people, the cattle of Akkad will lay them down in 
security (?fargdnish) upon the fields.’’ 

But all the painstaking endeavors of the prophets 
were for the most part of no avail, and the catastrophes 
of the nation which seemed to the prophets to be the judg- 
ments of Yahveh broke upon them. The ten tribes of the 
northern kingdom became the spoil of the Assyrian do- 
minions and fell to pieces in further exile, and even the 


234 BABEI, AND BIBLE. 


inhabitants of the southern kingdom were uprooted from 
the Canaanite soil and transplanted in foreign lands. Still 
the holy zeal of the prophets of Yahveh continued to burn, 
they comforted their people with the promise that Yahveh 
would turn aside their captivity, would bring his people 
back and lead them to a glorious future if from this time 
forth they would cling undisturbed to the law of Moses 
and would serve no other god than Yahveh. 

And the hope of the prophets did not remain unful- 
filled. In 539 B. C. when without a stroke of the sword 
Cyrus entered the gates of Babylon which had been opened 
to him by treachery from within, and the people strewed 
his path with palm branches, he issued the command that 
to all cities whose gods had been carried away to Babylon, 
the gods should be returned and their former religion re- 
established, and to the exiled Judzans he gave permission 
to return in order that they might erect again at Jerusalem 
their ancient and venerable places of worship. 

It is true that only a relatively small number of 
Judzeans made use of the privilege granted them by the 
Persian monarch, but within those who did return to 
Palestine the joyful certainty came to be more and more 
confirmed that Yahveh had forgiven his people all their 
sins (Ps. lxxxv. 1-3) and himself had brought them back 
home to their own country, thus before all the nations of 
the earth acknowledging Israel to be his people. 

We all know the continuation of the history of Israel. 
Thetemple rebuilt upon Zion under the most discouraging 
circumstances, under Antiochus IV fell a prey to the most 
extreme devastation. The conquests of the Maccabezan 
heroes over the Syrian army raised once more the jubila- 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 235 


tions of devout Judeans to the utmost: ‘‘ Blessed is the 
people whose God is the Lord; and the people whom he 
hath chosen for his own inheritance’’ (Ps. xxxiii. 12). 
The proclamation of the glory of Yahveh was made known 
to all nations that his grace was great over Israel, that 
Israel was his, ‘‘ his people and the sheep of his pasture’’ 
(Ps. c. 3), heaven and earth shall glorify Yahveh as the 
one who has exalted Israel as the ‘‘ people near unto him’”’ 
(Ps. exlviii). New songs continually celebrated the king- 
dom of Yahveh and his anointed among all the nations 
of the earth. 

But the successes of the Maccabees brought about 
new defeats and renewed search for a habitation: the rule 
of Yahveh, or the kingdom of God and his Messiah with 
all the extravagant earthly expectations connected with 
it, would come, but although postponed to a promised fu- 
ture, continued to disappear into the far and ever farther 
distance. 


hk 4 


A sower went forth to sow his seed,‘ and with gentle 
forbearing, and loving hand, and with words so homely 
and withal powerful put aside the barriers which a partic- 
ularistic national religion had erected between God and 
the world, and planted in the hearts of men a new concep- 
tion of God and his relation to humanity—Jesus of Naza- 
reth in Galilee who fulfilled the law and the prophets in 
that he interpreted both in anentirely new spirit, developed 
and perfected them. He made an end of all external le- 
gality and hypocrisy, elevated the laws of eating by the 


1 With these same words J. Wellhausen begins the 24th Chapter entitled ‘‘The 
Gospel," of his /sraelitische und Jiidische Geschichte, 5th ed. Berlin, 1904, p. 381. 


236 BABEL AND BIBLE. 


eternally valid word that not that which goeth into the 
mouth but that which cometh out of the mouth defileth 
the man; he met the misuse of the Sabbath with the bold 
remark that the Sabbath was made for man and not man 
for the Sabbath; he laid the emphasis of human iniquity 
upon the heart and its desires; he did away with the con- 
finement of worship to one particular place like Jerusalem, 
and for the pagan sacrifices and priestly ceremonial, sub- 
stituted the secret prayer in the privacy of one’s closet; 
he destroyed all hopes in a kingdom of God which would 
come in outward appearance, but taught rather that it was 
already dawning among men; by the removal of all al- 
leged prerogatives he opened to all men and to all nations 
alike the free and immediate access to their Heavenly 
Father; liberated the love of one’s neighbor from the - 
limitations which still clung to it and above all spiritualised 
the personal and human representation of God by the ever 
abiding words: ‘‘God is spirit, and those who worship» 
him must worship him in spirit and in truth’’ (John iv. 
24) ; ‘*God is love, and who abideth in love abideth in 
God and God in him.’’ ‘Truly a new religion which, 
when all the manifold human superfluities that are foreign 
to the personality and life of Jesus are removed, is still 
destined to save the world. 

‘‘Tf such and such a star appear on such and such a 
day, then will a mighty king arise in the West land’’— 
this and similar words we read repeatedly on Babylonian 
destiny tablets, and it is clear that such astrological lore 
is reflected in that story which is surrounded by an ever 
new fascination,— the story of the Wise Men of the East 
who had seen the star of the newborn king in the sky and 


BABEL AND BIBLE. Z2a7T 


came to worship the babe (Matt. ii). We rejoice in this 
story, for what Goethe’ says is true: ‘‘By no means do 
we know what we owe in general to Luther and the Ref- 
ormation. We have been made free from the fetters of 
spiritual narrowness, and as a result of the continual 
growth of culture we have become qualified to return to 
the fountain head and comprehend Christianity in its 
purity. Once more we have the courage to stand with 
firm feet upon God’s earth and to have a realisation of 
our God-given human nature. Let spiritual culture con- 
tinue to advance, let the natural sciences grow in ever 
greater extent and depth, and the human spirit expand 
as it will, it will never advance beyond the sublimity and 
moral elevation of Christianity as it glistens and gleams 
in the Gospels.”’ 

As certainly as this is the truth, when we search the 
ancient Babylonian world and see the leading spirits of 
Babylon endeavoring with earnest zeal, even with fear 
and trembling to seek God and the truth, we can joyously 
welcome the fact that the Evangelist granted to the Bab- 
ylonian Wise Men to be the first to offer their homage at 


the cradle of the Christian faith. 


1 Biedermann, Goethes Gespriche. Leipsic, 1890. Vol VIII, 149. Con- 
versations with Eckermann. March 11, 1832. 





INDEX 





INDEX 


Aaron’s blessing, 20, 153. 

Abomination, 224. 

Abraham, 4, 60, 134. 

Abu Habba, xiv. 

Abydenus, 87. 

Achan, 37. 

Adam, First and second, 48. 

Adam-shum-usur, 221. 

Akko, 35. 

Alexandretta, Syria, ix. 

Amenophis ITI, 35. 

Amenophis IV, 34, 35. 

American excavations, xix; at Nip- 
pur, 3. p 

Amraphel. See Hammurabi. 

Ancient history illuminated, xxi. 

Andre, Walter, 84. 

Angel, Assyrian, 51; of the pesti- 
lence, 218; of Yahveh, 218. 

Angels, 53 ff. 161. 

Antelopes, 803 Grazing, 15, 27. 

Antioch, ix. 

Antiochus IV, (Epiphanes), 88, 234. 

Archeology, German Evangelical In- 
stitute of, 80. 

Ark of the Covenant, 95. 

Arrapachitis, 78. 

Art, Babylonian, xxi. 

Asarhaddon, 171. 

Ashdod, 6. 

Ashera, 232. 

Ashur, 226. 

Askalon, 35. 

Assyria, Military system of, 13-18. 

Assyrian angel, 51; beard, 141; 
meals, 23; sculptures, xxi; stand- 


ards, 227; throne, 19; troops, II- 
13. 

Astronomy, XxXill. 

Astruc, Jean, 41, 130.. 

Asur, 224 ff.; armed, 227; and Bel, 
225; Emblem of, 227; Esara, tem- 
ple of, 225. : 

Asurbanipal, xii, 55, 180; Library of, 
73; Ten-sided prism of, 79. 

Asurnazirpal, Palace of, xii. 

Attributes of gods, 21t. 


Baal, 231. 

Babel, 179, 231; Coffins found at, 49; 
confirms the Bible, xiv; Dragon of, 
85; Marduk, god of, 43. 

Babel and Bible, Alfred Jeremias on, 
137; Catholic News on 136; con- 
trasts, 220; Cornill on, 132; Har- 
nack on, 125 ff.; Joseph Halévy 
on, 130 f.; linked together, 2; Op- 
position to, 71; Parallels between, 
OI. 232: 

Babylon, Influence of, 33, 37; Istar 
Gate of, 83; Lion of, 85; Marduk, 
god of, 209; Ruins of, 82; Splendor 
Of, 32, 34: 

Babylonia, Commercial and judicial 
life of, xvi; Hebrew antiquity con- 
nected with, xxii. 

Babylonian art, xxi; ethics and re- 
ligion, 196, 213; language, 37; pray- 
ers, 206 ff. 

Babylonians seekers after God, 219. 

Baentsch, Bruno, 118. 

Barth, J.; 117, 154. 


242 


Beard, Assyrian, 16, 18, I41. 

Bedouin desert, 89. 

Beilan, ix. 

Bel, 153; and Asur, 225; Consort of, 
225; E-kur temple of, 225; identi- 
fied with Marduk, 225; Temple of, 
Bint-el-Amir, xix; Temple of, at 
Nippur, xviil. 

Belshazzar, 176. 

Benediction, 29 f.; Babylonian, 212. 

Berlin Museum, 49. 

Berosus, 145, 159. 

Beth Shemesh, 95. 

Bezold, 151. 

Bible, cause of interest in Babel, 1; 
Confirmations of, 71; Traces of 
polytheism in, 146; Study of, 2. 

Bibliography, 117 f. 

Biedermann, 237 n. 

Billerbeck, Colonel, 23. 

Bint-el-Amir, Temple of Bel, xix. 

Bison, 81. 

Blessing, Aaron’s, 29, 153. 

Botta, Emile, x f., 6, 27. 

Breath of life, 90, 222. 

British Museum, xii, xiii, xv, 61, 201. 

Budde, Dr. Karl, 117. 

Bull, Head of winged, 16. 

Bulls, Transportaion of, 25. 

Burnt offerings, 100, 113, 213. 


Canaan, Conquest of, 106. 

Canaanites, 162. 

Canal of Keber, 4. 

Cappadocia, 171. 

Carchemish, (Dsherabis), 5, 6. 

Carus, Paul, 139. 

Catholic News on “Babel and Bible,” 
136 f. 

Chabor, 78. 

Chalach, 73, 78. 

Cherubim, 230. 

Child, Adopted, 183. 

Childbirth, Istar, goddess of, 109. 

Children of wife and slave, 183. 

Chosen people, 226. 

Christianity, 237. 

Circle of 360 degrees, xxiii. 

Circumcision, 226. 


BABEL AND BIBLE: 


Coins, 31, 37. 

Constantinople, Museum of, 186. 

Cornill, Dr: C. H., 118; 167> ene. eas 
bel and Bible,” 132. 

Craig, James A., IQI. 

Creation, xxii, 90; Babylonian poem 
of, 42 f., 159, 187; Biblical account 
of, 45, 104, 133. 

Cunning, Sir Stratford, xi. 

Cyrus, 87, 176, 234. 


Dagon, 95. 

Daily Telegraph, xiv. 

Danneil, Heinrich, 118. 

Darius, 171; hunting lion, 9. 

David, 19; Psalms of, 188. 

Days of the week, xxiii. 

Deity, Manifestations of, personified, 
2Ti. 210: 

Delitzsch, Franz, 154, 165. 

Deluge, xxii. 

Demons, 55 f., 58, 134. 

De Morgan, xx, 97. 

De Sarzec, Ernest, xvii, xx. 

Desert, 89, 220. 

Devil, The Old Serpent, 45, 161. 

Devils, 55 f. 134. 

Dieulafoys, xx. 

Dillmann, 96. 

Dirge, Babylonian, 190. 

Divine presence in all things, 216, 219. 

Doller, Johannes, 117. 

Dragon of Babel, 85. 

Dryander, 120. 

Dsherabis, See Carchemish. 

Ea, Emblem of, 2109. 

Eannadu, xvii; Vulture stele of xxi. 

East India Company, x. 

Eclipses, Solar, 20. 

E-kur, Temple of Bel, 225. 

El, The name, 60 ff., 148 ff., 222. 

El-Amarna, 34, 35, 38, 222. 

Elamites, 29, 97, 173, 180. 

Emblems of the gods, 217, 219. 

Emperor William and higher criti- 
cism, 139; on revelation, 122. 

Enannatum, xvii. 

Engelkemper, Dr. W., 118. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 243 


Entemena, xvii, 174. 

Erech, 179. 

Esagila, Temple of Marduk, 209. 

Esara, Temple of Azur, 225. 

Esarhaddon, 161; Palace of, xii. 

Ethical monotheism, 106, 110. 

Ethics and religion, Babylonian, 196, 
213. 

Ethnic movements traced by excava- 
tion, XX1. 

Eve, Statue of, 100. 

Evilmerodach, 202. 

Excavations of Babylonia and As- 
syria, I, 7I, 173; French, 130. 

Exile, Ten tribes of, 233. 

Ezekiel, Vision of, 64, 130. 


Faith and science, 128, 143. 

Fall of man, 48, 130, 133, 157. 

Flandin, Eugene, xi. 

Flood, Babylonian story of the, 41, 
39 f£., 107; Biblical story of the, 41; 
of 1876, 39. 

Foreigners, 203. 

French achievements, xi; at Susa, 
xx}; excavations, xvil; excavations 
in Assyria and Babylonia, 130; gov- 
ernment, Appropriation of, xi. 


Galilean dialect, 180. 
Galileans and Samaritans, 
nian character of, I81. 

Ganneau, Clermont, 178. 

Genealogy, Tribal, 171, 173. 

Genesis, Book of, xxii. 

George, St., and the dragon, 45. 

German Evangelical Institute of Ar- 
cheology, 89. 

Germany, Xx. 

Giesebrecht, 223 n. 

Gilgamesh epic, 41, 49. 

Goat-fish, 219. 

God, “Ancient of Days,’ 105; Child 
of, 207; Conception of, 91, 136, 142; 
Fear of, 204; Grace of, 208; Most 
high,224; Names formed with, 103; 
the Father, 105; The word, 59, 62; 
Yahveh the only true, III. 

Gods, Attributes of 211; Emblems of 


Babylo- 


the, 217, 219; living powers, 209, 
211; National, 222, 224, 226, 230 ff.; 
Polytheisticconceptionof,62; speak 
to men, 91, 211; Unity in multi- 
plicity of, 220. 

God - conception, Babylonian, 
Particularistic, 222; 
Sumerian, 214. 

Goethe, 60, 122, 237. 

Goliath, 19. 

Gomer, I7I. 

Good Samaritan, 202. 

Goshen, 78. 

Grotefeld, Georg Friedrich, xx. 

Gudea, xvii; Statue of, 175. 

Gula, oI. 

Gunkel, D., 118, 136, 159 


214; 
Semitic, 222; 


Halévy, Joseph, on “Babel and Bible,” 
130 f. 

Hamath, 231. 

Hammurabi (Amraphel), xvi, 61, 97- 
99, 122, 134; Code of, 29, 31, 97, IOI, 
124, 196, 182, 183, 197, 201, 202, 203, 
204, 221; contemporary of Abra- 
ham, 9. 

Harnack, 166; on “Babel and Bible,” 
125 ff. 

Haupt, Paul, 158, 178. 

Haynes; J. E1., "xviii, xix, 20x. 

Hebrew antiquity connected with 
Babylonia, xxii; scripture, 113. 

Hell, 5o. 

Hellmann, G., 162. 

Herodotus, 199. 

Heuzey, Léon, 175. 

Hezekiah, 6, 7. 

Hilla, xiv. 

Hilprecht, Hermann V., xviii. 

Hoffmann, Georg, 178. 

Hollman, 120. 

Hommel, Prof. Dr., 117, 157, 

Huldah, 232. 


N 
+ 
On 
to 


Idols, 111, 209; Procession of, 25. 
Image worship, 106, 211. 

Images, modes of representation, 210. 
Immortality, 38. 

Ionia, I7I. 


244 


Iron implements, 57. 

Islam, Paternoster of, IIo. 

Israel, Twelve tribes of, 37, 62, 65. 

Istar, Gate of Babylon, 83, 85, 159; 
goddess of childbirth, 109; Psalm 
to, IQI. 


Japheth, 171. 

Jastrow, Morris, 206 n., 225 n. 

Jehovah, The name, 141. 

Jehu, 78. 

Jensen, Dr. Peter, 118, 147, 152, 153, 
[54, 155, 157, 160, 162) 163. 

Jeremias, Dr. Alfred, 117, 154, 156, 
220 n.; on “Babel and Bible,” 137. 

Jeremias, Friedrich, 167. 

Jericho, 37. 

Jesus of Nazareth, 235. 

Jonah, x, 88. 

Judgments of Yahveh, 233. 

Jurisprudence, xxiii. 


Kabar. See Keber. 

Kammosh, 223. 

Kamphausen, 223 n. 

Kaulen, Franz, 118. 

Keber, Canal of, 4. 

Keil, P.,. 118. 

Khorsabad, x; Palace at, 33, 56. 

King, L. W., tot. 

Kittel, Prof. D. R., 117, 118, 150. 

Knieschke, W., 117. 

Kohler, 183, 203. 

Koldewey, 100. 

Konig, Dr. Eduard, 117, 145, 148, 149, 
150, 151, 156, 160. 

Koran, 60, I10, 130. 

ikronos, xv. 

Kudurru, Assyrian general, 9I. 

Kutha, 72, 179, 231. 

Kuyunjik, x, xii. 


Lachish, 6. 

Lagash, xvii. 

Lamentation, Psalms of, 190. 

Language, Babylonian, 37. 

Law, of retribution, 101; Tablets of 
the, 94. 

Laws, Israelitic, 96, I0r. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Layard, Sir Austen Henry, xi. 

Lazarus and the rich man, 50. 

Leviathan, 158, 160. 

Library of Sardanapalus, xiii. 

Life, Breath of, 90. 

Lion of Babylon, 85. 

Lioness, Dying, 27. 

Loftus, William Bennett, xx. 

London Society for Biblical Archz- 
ology, xiv. 

Love of neighbor, 107, 200 f., 236. 

Love, Universal, 202. 

Lugal, Zaggisi, xviii. 

Luschans, Felix von, 185. 

Luther, 123, 182, 237. 


Maccabees, 234. 

Madai, 171. 

Magi, Babylonian xiii. 

Magic power, 90. 

Mahomet, 50, 60, 223. 

Man, Creation of, 90; Fall of, 48, 
130, 157. 

Manifestations of deity personified, 
2it, 218. 

Manu, Law-book of, 97. 

Marduk, 208; All gods united in, 65; 
and Tiamat, 42 f., 45; and Yahveh, 
43; Bel identified with, 225; Em- 
blem of, 219; Esagila, temple of, 
209; god of Babel, 43, 209; -litany, 
225. 

Marduk-nadin-achi, 73. 

Mashalzi, 78. 

McCormack, Thomas J., 137. 

Meals, Assyrian, 23. 

Measures, 37. 

Medes, xii, 171. 

Media, Villages of, 78. 

Melchizedek, 224. 

Melech, 223. 

Menahem, 178 f. 

Mené mené tekél ti-pharsin, 178 

Merodach-Baladan, 7. 

Meyer, Dr. S., 110. 

Michael, St., and the beast, 45. 

Milcom, 223. 

Military system of Assyria, 13-18. 

Mohammed. See Mahomet. 





BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Mohl, Julius von, x, xx. 


Monotheism, 59; Babylonian, 146; 
Ethical, 106, 110, 145; National, 
112; Semitic, 220. 


Moon-god father of sun-god, 218. 
Mordecai, 231. 

Mosaic laws, 96, 101. 

Moses, 65, 94. 

Mosul, x, 6. 

Mugheir, 5. 

Musical instruments, 184. 


Naaman, 231. 

Nabopolassar, 161, 175. 

Nabuna’id, xv, 175; Clay cylinder of, 
XVi. 

Names formed with “God,” 61, 103; 
of girls and boys, 108. 

Naram-Sin,221; Image of,xxi; Plat- 
form of xix; son of Sargon I, xvi, 
XVil, XViii. 

Nebi Yunus, x. 

Nebo, 153; Prayer to, IoI. 

Nebobaladan, xvi. 

Nebuchadnezzar, 5, 83, 165, 175; In- 
sanity of, 87; Palace of, xx. 

Neighbor, Love of, 107, 200 f., 236. 

Nergal, 72. 

Nimrud, xii; Palaces of, 36. 

Nineveh, 78, 88; Excavations at, xil; 
Library of Asurbanipal at, 73. 

Ninib, 155, 225. 

Nippur, 49, 225; American excava- 
tions at, 3; Temple of Bel at, xviii. 

Nisibis, 78. 

Nizir, 40. 

Noah, 91, 108; Babylonian (Xisuth- 
ros), xv, 39 f., 108. 

Noldeke, Th., 178. 

Nunia, x. 





Obelisk, Black, of Shalmaneser II, 
44, 73, 78. 

Obscene details, 109. 

Oettli, Samuel, 118, 145, 146, 149, 159, 
160. 

Old Testament, Chronology of the, 
29; interpretation, xxii; source of 
history, 71; Text of, 86. 


245 


Open Court, 136, 137. 
Oppert, Jules, xx. 
Ox, Wild, 79, 84. 
Oxen, Winged, 230. 


Paradise, 50-53, QI. 

Pasturage, Peaceful, 233. 

Patriarchs, Ten antediluvian, 41. 

Pekah, 178. 

Pentateuch criticism, 41, 93, 96. 

Perfection, 66, 70. 

Perjury, 204. 

Peters; John, Ps, xviit. 

Pharaoh-necho, 5. 

Philadelphia, Expeditions from, xviii, 
nenal 

Pillar of cloud and fire, go. 

Pinches, 147. 

Place, Victor, xi, 33, 56. 

Polytheism, 62, 65, 103, 106; Traces 
of, in Bible, 146. 

Pottery, 56. 

Prayer, 212; Babylonian, 206 ff. 

Priest-kings of Lagash, xvii. 

Priestly regulations, 204. 

Prince, John Dyneley, 178. 

Procession of Idols, 25, i153. 

Prophecy. 232. 

Prophets, 66, 232, 234; Denunciation 
by, 107; Pre-Exilic, 232. 

Psalms, 186 ff.; Acrostic, 188; of 
David, 188; of lamentation, 190; 
Penitential, 207; Rhythm of Baby- 
lonian, 188; to Istar, Igr. 

Pul, 178 f. 

Punishment for sin, 47. 


Rassam, Hormuzd, xi f., xiv, xx. 
Rawlinson, Sir Henry, xx, 4. 
Re’em, 79. 

Reformation, 114, 237. 

Religion, and science, 142; Develop- 
ment of, 114; and ethics, Babylo- 
nian, 196, 213; Ethical manifesta- 
tions of, I13. 

Religious life, 114; thought, Puri- 
fication of, 57 f. 

Remu, 8o. 

Retribution, Law of, ror. 


246 


Return to Palestine, 234. 
Revelation, 70, 121; Primitive, 71. 
Rhythm of Babylonian psalms, 188. 
Rich, Claudius James, x. 

Riedel, Prof., 119. 

Rosenthal, Dr. Ludwig A., 118. 
Ruth and Naomi, 223. 


Sabbath? 37 £05. 101. (131. ni321SSis 
236; Origin of, Iot. 

Sacrifices, 37, 204, 213. 

Sathana, 72, 179, 231: 

Samaritan, Good, 202. 

Samaritans and Galilzans, 
nian character of, 181. 

Sapardzans, 171. 

Sardanapalus, Consort of, 25, 130; 
hunting lions, 19-22; Library of, 
xiii, 39; North palace of, xii. 

Sargon I (of Akkad), xvi, 
XVill. 

Sargon IT (Assyrian king, conqueror 
of Samaria), 6; 7; 171, 579;).cyl- 
inder, 2313) Palace of “xi; 26° £: 
33, 56. 

Saul, ro. 

Scheil, 97. 

Schrader, Eberhard, 87. 

Science, and faith, 128; and religion, 
142; versus faith, 143. 

Sculptures, Assyrian, xxi. 

Seekers after God, Babylonians, 2109. 

Sellin, Ernst, 155, 165, 200. 

Semiramis, Hanging gardens of, xx. 

Sendschirli, 185. 

Sennacherib, 6; Southwest palace of, 
Xil. 

Sepharad. 172, 

Serpent, 158, 159; and woman, 47; 
called the Devil, 45; Old, which is 
the Devil, 161. 

Seven, 80, 156. 

Shalmaneser II, Black obelisk of, 44, 
73, 78; Bronze gates of, 12, 18; 
Palace of, xii. 

Shamash, 208; the god of law, 90. 

Shem, 172. 

Sidon, 35. 


Babylo- 


XVil, 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Sin, 47, 205 ff.; Consequences of, 205; 
Punishment for, 47. 

Sinaitic peninsula, 95. 

Sin-muballit, father of Hammurabi, 
61. 

Sippar, Sun-god of, 62 f.; Temple 
Ebabbara of the sun at xv. 

Sixty, 28, 131. 

Smend, 18t. 

Smith, George, xiv, 5. 

Smith, Robertson, 29. 

Solar eclipses, 29. 

Solomon’s temple, 209. 

Son of man, 181. 

Sower went forth, 225 

Spittle, go. 

Standards, Assyrian, 227. 

Sublime Porte, xi. 

Suess, Eduard, 39, 108. 

Sumerian architect, 174 f.; God-con- 
ception, 214; priest-king, 28, 131. 

Sumerians, 27, 28, 109, 173. 

Sun-god, Moon-god father of, 218; 
of Sippar, 62 f. 

Susa, xx. 

Symbolism, 91. 


Tablets, Clay, 37; of the law, 94. 

Talmud, 130. 

Tasnim, the spring, 51. 

Tehom, 160. 

Tell Ibrahim, 73. 

Telloh, xvii. 

Temple Ebabbara of the sun at Sip- 
par, xv. 

Ten antediluvian patriarchs, 41; com- 
mandments, 46, 94, 96, 101 f., 197 
ff.; tribes of exile, 233. 

Terach, 231. 

Thebes, Conquest of, 78. 

Thousand and One Nights, x. 

Three, 8o. 

Throne, Assyrian, 19. 

Tiamat, 158, 159; and Marduk, 42 f., 
45. 

Tiele, €.°.P3 087: 

Tiglathpileser, 178; Palace of, xii. 

Time, Methods of reckoning, 29. 


BABEL AND BIBLE. 


Torah, 94, 96. 

Truth, Speaking the, 47. 
Truthfulness, 199, 233. 
Tyre, 35. 


Underworld, Babylonian, 4o. 

Unity in multiplicity of gods, 220. 
Ur of Kasdim, 130; of the Chaldees, 
4, 173. 

Ur-Bau, xvii. 

Ur-Gur, King, xix. 

Ur-Nina, xvii; and his sons, Sculp- 
ture of, xxi. 





Verbal inspiration, 92. 


Warka, 40. 

Weights, 37. 

Weissbach, 225 n. 
Wellhausen, J., 20, 235 n. 


William II, Emperor, 89; Letter of, 


120 ff.; on revelation, 122. 
Winckler, Hugo, 162, 163. 


247 


Winged oxen, 230. 

Wise Men of the East, xiii, 1, 236. 

Wolff, P., 119, 167. 

Woman and serpent, 47; Position of, 
108. 

Writing, 31. 


Xisuthros, Babylonian Noah, xv, 39 
£5 107. 


Yahveh, 91, 223; and Marduk, 43; 
Angel of, 218; armed, 227; god of 
the universe, 66; god of wrath, 70; 
Judgments of, 233; Name of, 62, 
134, 141, 150 ff., 223 n.; on wings 
of the wind, 227; the only true 
God, 11; with horns, 104. 

“Yea” and “Nay,” 47, 200. 


Zab, 78. 
Zimmern, I5I, 153, 161, 188, 223 n. 
Zodiac, Signs of, xxill, 57, 59. 





LOST OBS ay 


ON LIFE AFTER. DE 


GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNER 


TRANSLATED BY 


DR. HUGO WERNEKKE 


Head Master of the Realgymnasium at Weimar. 


Pages, 133. Cloth, gilt top. 1t2mo. Price, 75 cents net. Postage 8 cents. 


Gustav Theodor Fechner was a professor of physics, but he took great interest in 
sychology and by combining the two sciences became one of the founders of the science 
f “psychophysics,” based upon the obvious interrelation between sensation and nerve- 
‘tivity. While he did much creditable work in the line of exact psychology, he devoted 
iimself with preference to those problems of the soul which touch upon its religious and 
noral life and its fate after death. His little book On Life After Death is his most im- 
ortant publication in this line. 


Fechner believes in the immortality of the soul, but his treatment is of especial 
nterest because he uses a distinctive scientific method in dealing with the subject. 
Though the thoughtful reader may often find the ideas expressed at variance with his — 
reconceived notions of the after life, he cannot fail to be impressed with the importance 
ind suggestiveness of Professor Fechner’s thought. 





“I wish to congratulate you and the translator upon the beautiful translation of Fech- 
er, It did not seem posstble that such a translation, breathing as tt did the entire spirit 
tf the ortginal, could have been made by a German. TI have seldom seen a more successful 
it of translating”»—DAVID EUGENE SMITH, Ph. D., LL. D., Professor of Math- 
matics, Teachers’ College, New York City. 


“The essay of which thts little book is a translation was first published in German 
2 1835. Its author held that ‘the spirits of the dead continue to exist as individuals in 
he living, and has worked out this idea in quaint suggestions and meditations which 
vill interest many and perhaps will add somewhat of tllumination to their eager gaze into 
he world beyond death. It ts devout, hopeful and confident of a kind of a personal 
mmortality.”"—THE CONGREGATIONALIST AND CHRISTIAN WORLD. 


“A volume that will greatly interest tf not influence lovers of philosophical writings.” 
THE BURLINGTON HAWK EYE. ee / 


THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING GO. 


1322 WABASH AVENUE, CHICAGO. 





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